Television commentary, just because I like it.
I just thought I’d pop my head into this blog to say that I’m really getting sick of watching Coach act like a complete jerk-ass on Survivor. Which is to say, I can’t stop watching.
Damn those network executives!
I’ve been watching the Olympics intently, as I do every four years, and I keep coming back to the same conclusion: no one cares anymore.
Oh, we tune in to the Olympics every two years, Winter and Summer. There’s at least one advertising darling around which all the coverage and commercials revolve. A lot of money is spent on elaborate sets and coverage to give the impression that the entire games are being covered.
But when’s the last time you saw the triathalon or fencing competitions televised as anything other than a summary? Mostly, NBC is showing gymnastics, water sports (meaning diving and swimming, not guys peeing on each other), track and field races, beach volleyball and basketball. This mirrors the same coverage you can expect on non-Olympic years. Everything else is relegated to the “also featured” slots generally reserved for pre-bumper slots of little import.
I miss ABC’s Wide World of Sports. Remember being able to watch track and field or downhill skiing any given weekend those sports were in season? Remember actually knowing some of the personalities featured in the Olympic Games before they got there? Yeah, I do. And it was awesome.
Don’t get me wrong: I dig football in the fall and winter, love watching baseball in the summer. But there are so many other sports that lots of people like that just don’t get coverage. I could make a strong argument for the notion that our nation might be a lot less fat if only we allowed kids to think there were ways to be physically fit that don’t involve football, baseball or hockey.
Now that Last Comic Standing is over, I have to say that the format of the show really made no sense at all to me. I feel bad for those people who competed, as I don’t really think the contest really showed off what they could do. For example, someone can correct me if I’m wrong (I frequently am), but the original versions of LCS just had the comics doing their standup routines throughout the competition. I seem to recall they just allowed viewers to vote for their favourites and eliminated the lowest-voted comic.
I can see how that was probably way too much standup for television, especially if you’re looking to bring in more of an audience than us stand up lovers. But I think they went way too far the other direction, without any noticeable benefit. If this was a show about being a chef, I would expect that a chef would be compelled to do many different styles of cooking. But a comic’s art is typically quite unique and individual and entirely without the formal training chef’s sometimes receive at places like the Culinary Institute. How do you make a stand up comedian suddenly into a prop comic? You can’t. And since comedy is an art that needs to always be on the edge of lame, the resulting episode was remarkably lame.
But worst of all was the elimination competition. The only time you get to see stand up comics doing what they do is at elimination, and then two out of three comics go home. Not only is that a shame for us in the audience, who tuned in to watch good stand up, but it’s bad for the comics who don’t get an opportunity to hone their material for what the audience likes. That’s an especially important consideration for those comics who weren’t from the states, as they don’t have as good a feel for what works here.
Illiza managed to use that fact against her competitors in at least one elimination round. Good for her for being smart as well as funny. But it might have made a better game if more sporting rules had been adopted. Besides which, who doesn’t like to root for the guy/girl who ends up in the bottom again and again in these shows but manages to save themselves?
It’s also really unfortunate that they went for a popularity contest among the comics rather than viewers choice to determine the people threatened with elimination. Sure, it brings sort of a Survivor feel to the show, but it’s not as good and it’s not as interesting, especially when two out of three comics go home after elimination.
In the end, I do agree with the choice of comics for the final, and I think Illiza deserved to win. Incredibly, the two best comics out of the bunch did in fact make it to the finals. But I think that was mostly luck, not the efficacy of the show’s format. Let’s hope next season is cooler than this one.
I’ve decided that I’m going to go ahead and throw yet another blog on HN.net, just because I’ve found yet another relatively narrow topic which I’d like to talk about and have no place to do it. This blog is dedicated to my observations of television and the stuff I’m watching.
I’d feel silly commenting about Survivor, or Last Comic Standing, or Top Chef or any of the myriad of television shows I watch anywhere else. It’s all very trivial. But I’d like to write about it, nonetheless. Hence with the freedom that comes with having a multi-blog platform comes trivial blogs with no real value.
I hope whom ever reads this really enjoys it!
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