I haven’t seen all the music videos for the Video Music Awards’ nomination for Best Female Video, just the six snippets they pancaked together before announcing the winner. There were six relatively different setups (a wedding, a car, Bob Ross’s empty gray canvas), but the music? Sweet merciful repetition, if you would’ve told me that was all the same song, I’d have believed you. But, of course, this is not music. These are music videos, where the purpose and intent is to, I guess, try and make your head explode by trying to figure out what the hell is going on in the first place. If you can accomplish that, then you are a shoe-in to win a VMA Award and use your PIN number to withdraw money from an ATM machine.
Now to rag on Taylor Swift… somewhat. She said she had always dreamed of winning that award. Not a Grammy, but a VMA. Any award which is created by a TV station really doesn’t have much bearing. Athletes don’t dream about winning an ESPY. The home run record? The world’s fastest man? Most hot dogs in 12 minutes? Sure. But the ESPY is a throw-in. And pop performers’ dreams are probably similar. They want platinum records. They want to not become cokewhores by age 22. These are respectable dreams. To put your hopes and dreams into winning “Best Music Video,” a creation which was largely the work of a studio, a director, and a room full of marketers, is probably not what little girls hope to win someday.
Written on September 14, 2009 | Posted in TV | 3 Comments
It’s another one of those trainwreck premises. Women on TV who are about to get married IN REAL LIFE™ turn the bitchness to 11 as their wedding date approaches. The show is called Bridezillas.
Now, I mean no disrespect to this super lady when she harmlessly asks why the girls act this way when they know full well they are on a show called Bridezillas? After all, if a show was called The Biggest Bitch In The World, and a featured girl on the show acted in the nicest way possible throughout, nobody’d watch it, people wouldn’t have their jaws dropped, and I wouldn’t be blogging about it.
“Reality” it ain’t. It’s ridiculous psycho hose beast theater done on purpose. I’m not suggesting the TV producers coach or even suggest the the brides-to-be that they might wanna yell at the groom, maid of honor, and perhaps the minister, but the 15-minute star knows full well what’ll happen if she does so.
So when the entire viewing audience is saying, “I can’t believe they are acting like that,” well, I can.
(By the way, not to throw spoilers in your face, but the weddings end up fine.)
Remember when reality TV was meant to be about watching REAL people doing REAL things? Well, the only thing real in planned premise television is their first name. Is that all we want? Will used his real name on Fresh Prince of Bel-Air. Same with the signature shows for Tim Allen, Ray Romano, Bob Newhart, Jerry Seinfeld, Larry David, Charlie Day, and Adam West, who plays a curious character named “Adam West” in Family Guy.
And if you really want to see a wedding gone wrong, wouldn’t you rather see Mr. Goodguy run into the wedding at the last second, stopping the love of his life from marrying Mr. Antagonist? Now that’s a great premise.
Leave it to my girlfriend to somehow take a Playboy model and have me completely disinterested.
I don’t know how she does it, but girls, here’s some advice if your boyfriends have an unhealthy fixation on attractive celebrities: learn about them. Read and watch everything about them. Try to discuss minutiae of their lives with your beau. This will probably result in the guy being turned off about the girl.
I didn’t even really care about Kendra Wilkinson, and for a while, Brit would keep refreshing my memory as “that girl dating that one football player.” (Because Hank Baskett, is, like, a legendary wide receiver or something.)
But some people somewhere thought she would be perfect for a planned premise television show. It’s called Kendra (great name!), and it delves into how she’s adjusting to being on her own. I mean, all of us have, at some point in our lives, learned to live on our own, but none of us have had to overcome the obstacle of living in a large house with giant boobs.
They say that everyone kinda sorta secretly watches reality TV, whether I like to admit it or not. And the truth is … well, yeah, I watch it. But she watches it, and I’m in the room as well. I could leave the room entirely in protest, but I’m just not that big of a douche. (Just enough to pass as an insufferable blogger.) So I catch snippets of the show while hiding behind my laptop. That oughta be enough to validate the following rhetorical question: why?
She’s blonde and pretty and has a modicum of charisma. She has a supportive family and a big house and is married to an athlete and gets to call Hugh Hefner on occasion à la Suzanne Somers on Three’s Company. It’s just … filler show. You know that E! can’t show eight hours of The Soup in a row, so they need something else.
If the show gets cancelled, no big deal. There’ll be some other pretty person with a reasonably interesting life that can be captured on camera with WACKY UNPREDICTABLE PREMISES! Oh no, a long lost cousin showed up for dinner with a TV producer! And I left my makeup kit in the cabana!
[commercial break]
Oh, everything turned out all right, albeit uneventful. Happy ending!
It’s the most popular type of programming on TV. What, you’ve never heard of planned premise television? You may know it better by its street name, “reality TV.” It’s such a great name, because the name implies, hey, this is real! Average people always have celebrities dropping by, doing wild and unpredictable things!
Got three hours to fill and you hate syndicated television? It’s one of the easiest shows to pitch, produce, and popularize. All you need are the following key ingredients:
A low budget
People desperate for attention who are:
a. Not famous
b. Once interesting
Someone to come up with wacky and interesting premises
Now, there’s bound to be hours and hours of boring footage, but nobody ever needs to see that. Just clip off the 30 minutes where people absolutely lose their pancreatic fluid because Brandy is acting like a total skank for no reason!!! (Actual reason: there’s a fucking camera on her.)
For the longest time, I could not understand why people would actually watch these shows, because they were so horribly done. But as it turns out that’s exactly the reason they are so popular. People aren’t looking for cinematic masterpieces, they are looking for trainwreck TV, trash TV, and escapes from reality … in something called reality television.
But this time, let’s try to get people to stop using that phrase. Reality TV isn’t. Planned premise television has one. Every plot point on the show is contrived from somebody who makes money by making TV shows. (The way the show unfolds, of course, WILL BLOW. YOUR. MIND.)
I have nothing against hybrid cars. How could anyone1? They use up less gas, which is both cheaper and better for the environment.
The cars sell themselves, I’d imagine, if it weren’t for that damn price point. The 2010 Prius is a bare minimum $22,000. You can buy a Civic for $7,000 less than that. Of course, would you save seven grand just on fuel costs over 10 years? Well, maybe.
So it’s up to the ad wizards to get you to buy a Prius. Talk about emission standards! Talk about how much money you’re going to save! Talk about its features! Just have a bunch of kids dressed up as flowers wave around to new age music!
I’m kind of scared to drive one, if all the foliage is going to come to life and dance around me, like I’m in Toontown. What if one of the Flower Children decide to cross the road, and I can’t slam on the brakes in time? Now I’ve got some little kid’s medical bills and psychiatry visits to pay for, which absolutely will not compensate for the extra $7,000 I paid for a hybrid.
1 – I guess the only way someone could dislike them would be if someone were to drive them on a 70 MPH highway going only 55 MPH so they don’t use up any gas. And if there’s no easy way to pass them, then yes, I suppose pain could be wished upon the driver of a car. But even then, it’s not the car’s fault.
Written on June 15, 2009 | Posted in TV | 1 Comment
Lately I’ve been on a rather rabid Law & Order binge. It’s enough to believe that any and all murders out there are bizarre, convoluted, and interesting. The truth is, a lot of murders out there are just plain ol’ sad and enacted by dumb guys who shoot, get caught, confess, and are sentenced by dinner.
You never see the episode where Jerry Orbach and Sam Waterston basically sleepwalk through the case without having to do anything extravagant. Nor do you see that on Monk, CSI, The Closer, Cold Case, Numb3rs, Psych, Saving Grace, and exactly 38 other shows that are very similar in nature, only the main character is EXTREMELY DIFFERENT THAN EVERYONE ELSE. It may be one of the great paradoxes in TV, in which taking a formula and beating it to death actually works, because nearly every show is somewhat amusing.
I guess the exception would be Law & Order: Trial By Jury, a spinoff that lasted all of one season, because it was nothing except trial procedures. The witness examination is always fun, but the behind-the-scenes strategy and lawyer negotiations pretty much made it the Virtual Boy of crime dramas.
Of course, my favorite iteration is now Law & Order: Criminal Intent, which could get only more amazing if they named it The Goldblum Files. Every single one has been jaw dropping, in that Jeff Goldblum is out there cleaning up the streets. There was even one scene in the episode “Astoria Helen” wherein Goldblum chased a northern Irish suspect, and was substantially far behind him. Goldblum walks almost as in slow motion, like he was in a Cars’ music video. Yet, during the next sequence, there was Goldblum, taking the cerebral hypotenuse and upending the antagonist in his own tracks. How on earth did he do that? Questioning his methods is now a misdemeanor.
If I want to commit a murder, and I know the Goldblums and D’Onofrios are out there nailing every one of these brilliant masterminds, then I’m just gonna go and make the shooting quick and dirty. I’m going to get caught, so I might as well not make a spectacle of it. (Of course, if I really had a choice, it would be not to kill. I’m just saying … if you make me angry enough, that’s how it’ll happen.)
As a sign of my definitive ability to hide from trends simply by breathing oxygen, last week was the first time I heard of Heidi Montag and Spencer Pratt, and it was from a joke in Conan O’Brien’s monologue. Neither the set-up nor the punch line provided any reference to who they were (or, what they were doing), but it was evident that neither of these two people were very well liked. (If there was a mental biathlon of Being Ignorant and Being Observant, I’d be a medal contender.)
So now I know who they are. As to why they’re famous, it’s beyond me. Then again, that’s pretty much how it goes. Paris Hilton was before her, and Britney before that. Kato Kaelin preceded them, and I guess before those people, the original celebrity trainwreck was Joan of Arc, the little tease. But these days, it seems that all the famous people making the rounds are just not people who are all that likeable.
Maybe that’s the point.
Imagine if all the people on television were learned, articulate Ken Jennings clones. You’d stop watching television and start reading books, exercising, and start talking to your loved ones, like, in person or over the phone and not through Twitter. TV stations can’t have that! They need brainfartin’ blondes and semi-sculpted adolescent men whose skin is capable of actually retaining its own douche. This is the only way the public can channel their anger toward distant idols rather than get the urge to bring a sledgehammer to the office and vent about unnecessary meetings or the new policy wherein every moment of your workday has to be documented and signed off by three managers.
So that’s one way that the general welfare is kept minty fresh. Of course, it can’t really be all that easy. After all, the average person ain’t that bright, so it may be difficult for television producers to find a character so behind the bell curve, climbing up to the median would put Sisyphus to shame. Case in point: most people aren’t quite sure what that last sentence meant.
It doesn’t seem to take much to find a catalyst for trash television. Sometimes all it takes for casting directors in New York or Los Angeles is to swivel one’s neck. And it doesn’t take arugula for brains to know that there’s good money in being hated, dim-witted, and beautiful. While the last one of those three can be hard to fake, the first two don’t even have to be organic, although it helps. Hey, if Angela from The Office can be cheerful in person, then antagonism can’t be that hard to toggle.
If you need more examples, I am wholeheartedly convinced that Ozzy Osbourne’s brain is not some sort of fine translucent paste that he makes it out to be. If he was, wouldn’t it be a little cruel to throw him on television to exploit him for endorsements ranging from Samsung to World of Warcraft? He knows exactly what he’s doing. He had an opportunity years ago to play the fool, because this was a time when people thought reality TV was more genuine than we now understand it is and the world took him almost too seriously, but they were captivated.
Even well aware that most of his songs were modestly intelligible, it was almost a given that his mind was last reported seen in 1982. Oh c’mon. He established relevance in a world where most rock stars from yesteryear are just trying to hang on. It’s not accidental fame.
The forehead-smashing reasons why certain people are famous don’t have to be revealed to us. But if more people were at peace with the fact that certain celebrities were hand-picked for a reason, it might help alleviate the headache a little bit. Most people seem fine with “pro” wrestling, because they know the outcomes are predetermined. It’s entertaining as hell, though, to some people. Network producers can’t fix the outcome of someone’s life, but they can script the characters and play the percentages that, for one brief moment, they’ll act like the insufferable bitch/prick of their dreams. And that’s all they need to keep their job and get another chance to find the next great beacon of antagonism.
The greatest non-Conan moment of TV this week had to be Family Feud’s “Battle Of The Divorced Couples,” which to me was the second reason the show was invented, right behind “families who actually hate each other,” provided we were compiling a list of most common reason based on a survey of 100 people.
Highlights of the show: “Name something a woman does with an engagement ring after the guy chooses not to commit.” The face-off woman got a strike on “keep it in a drawer.” Translation: “That guy over there behind the velvet podium? I want him back in the worst way.” No, not John O’Hurley. Although I wouldn’t mind him hosting the show in full-on J. Peterman character.
So, yay, Friday. Here’s where else you might’ve seen me this week:
Blogcritics — FIVESIGHT! It’s like foresight, but one better. Anyways, we started a new feature over at Blogcritics where five panelists look into the future of a given topic. This week was discussing the NBA Finals. So far it looks like I know jack diddy about basketball. Hey, while we’re discussing new features…
The Mac Daily — …this is probably as good a time as any to announce I’m going to be writing columns for this start-up website dedicated to MAC sports. The first one looks at the Toledo point shaving scandal, beats it into the ground, and then chides everyone for not making a bigger deal about it.
Yahoo! Sports — Live blogs of Game 3 and Game 4 were had. The experience was great. The outcomes were slightly worse. While we’re at it, you can also head over to Puck Daddy to enjoy the Game 5 live blog Saturday night. Just assume until about July that on any given night I’m probably live blogging hockey.
Toledo Free Press — C’mon, Suss, you’ve been given an assignment to write about NASCAR on the heels of the race at Michigan Speedway. You know you can do this. Okay, then NASCAR’s a sport, and here’s why.
See you Monday, unless someone hires me.
Written on June 5, 2009 | Posted in TV | 2 Comments
The world is not ready for Conan O’Brien. Then again, that’ll probably be the case even long after he steps away from The Tonight Show. The first two episodes of Conan’s trek from 12:30 am to 11:30 pm has been asking people if the Tonight Show crowd is ready for the Cone Zone.
I’ve heard mixed reviews, but it seems contingent on whether or not they enjoyed Conan’s work in the first place.
I don’t know if Hulu will upload the clip that had me causing the rest of the block drawing up plans to evict me, but … naw, it’s a yahadtabethere moment. Something about Max Weinberg being a Chinese woman. The joke it self was enough, but that they decided to continue that brand of humor for the supposedly starchy Leno crowd seemed to amplify the joke into near cardiac arrest. What I’m trying to say is I think NBC is trying to kill me and alienate me from all of my neighbors. Well met, able foes. Now watch me get hooked on some CBS sitcoms.
Written on June 3, 2009 | Posted in TV | 2 Comments
Don’t you just love Deadliest Catch? Aw, man, I can’t get enough of it. Who knew that such a grueling job would make for such riveting television? I can’t wait until they have celebrities start doing this!
In case you missed out on last night’s show and failed to set your DVR, lack a DVR, or successfully recorded it but are that lazy that you don’t want to watch the whole thing, relax. I have recapped the important notes from it. (Warning! Spoilers! Because you didn’t guess that already! You already kinda peeked anyways!)
• Some boats caught a lot of crab
• Some boats did not catch a lot of crab
• The new guy isn’t cuttin’ it
• The deckhands wagered a little bet
• The crew tried to get a little bit of sleep
• A huge wave crashed over the side of the boat
• The captain pined about all his years of being on the ocean
• The new guy REALLY isn’t cuttin’ it
• The audience feels slight empathy for the crabs
• The audience feels slight remorse for not working in a heated office, then changes over to Jon and Kate Plus Eight
Honestly, Kanye West, I’m really happy for you and your ability to wedge yourself into other people’s situations, but I’m going to steal your thunder, because you want this story to be about you.
The greatest non-Conan moment of TV this week had to be Family Feud’s “Battle Of The Divorced Couples,” which to me was the second reason the show was invented, right behind “families who actually hate each other,” provided we were compiling a list of most common reason based on a survey of 100 people.
