The Reality Television Conundrum

I remember the beginning of this wave of reality television. I’m not talking about “The Real World.” I mean when “Survivor” premiered. I mean when “American Idol” was hosted by a guy named Dunkleman. The shows began as summer fill-in options and quickly turned into viable, hugely popular prime-time shows. It wasn’t soon after that copies hit the television. Now more than 10 years later, reality television is more synonymous with scripted commentaries on indulgent American culture. Kardashians and housewives (aren’t they basically the same people?) are the faces of reality television. But I’m not here to talk about them. I’m here to talk about network reality TV and how to restore its former glory.

Ratings are down from its heyday, but I am still a huge fan of “Survivor.” The show has allowed the concept to grow organically with players who learn from the mistakes of previous contestants. They throw in new twists all the time with hidden immunity idols, returning players, etc. but the formula of two tribes, two challenges and a tribal council each episode allow fans to strategize at home. The shows that count on votes or opinions of judges aren’t as simple. “The Celebrity Apprentice,” for example, is laughable when considering it’s billed as a competition show. It’s Donald Trump’s individual opinion. Reality fans have long dealt with the annoying insinuation that their shows are rigged in order to keep dramatic players around to stir things up. Well that’s exactly what Trump does. If you don’t believe me, look no farther than Gary Busey and his two seasons on the show.

Since Simon Cowell began the giant game of musical chairs the singing competitions are playing; we now see that the competitors on each of these shows are actually less important than we thought. If the judges stink, nobody is watching. Did you know that “American Idol” season 11 winner Phillip Phillips’ song “Home” is the best-selling single of any “Idol” contestant ever? Yet his season of the show didn’t pull in the ratings of previous seasons because audiences had grown tired of Randy Jackson, Jennifer Lopez and Steven Tyler. Two of them then left and this year’s disaster of Mariah Carey, Nicki Minaj and Keith Urban joined Jackson behind the strategically placed Coca Cola glasses. Ratings went from bad to worse.

But across networks we saw two competitors emerge. Cowell’s “X Factor” has underperformed because it has a similar look to “Idol.” The format is actually pretty different, but there are judges behind a table. Now NBC did something different. Remove the table, claim the competition is blind to everything except a singer’s talent and insert four unique, popular and outspoken coaches (not judges) and you have “The Voice.” America was fooled by the gimmick of the blind auditions. We were drawn in and stayed tuned in because Blake Shelton is funny, Adam Levine is sarcastic, CeeLo is crazy and Christina Aguilera is annoying. At least those are my opinions.

But with all of these fan voted competition shows you get frustrating upsets. “American Idol” has made a habit of blaming America when a favorite falls short. But it’s the nature of the format. If your favorite stinks that night, you rally to their cause. If they kill it, you assume they’re safe. In-house competitions like “Survivor” or “The Biggest Loser” isolate contestants and give them a larger stake in their own destiny. The most annoying person in the world could drop a ton of weight or win a string of immunity challenges and take home the final prize on those shows. When Ryan Seacrest tells us it’s up to us to save our favorite singer, he’s wrong. It’s up to them. Frankly I would suggest the judges make the final calls, but they have proven so unreliable on most of these shows, it would quickly turn into the Trump scenario where they keep certain people around to boost ratings.

So what is the solution? I can’t list out these flaws without offering answers, can I? Well, I guess not. The first resolution is to find chemistry on the judging panels. We don’t want the biggest stars. We need knowledgeable people who the audience can trust when making their informed voting decisions. Simon Cowell, Usher, Nigel Lythgoe from “So You think You Can Dance,” these are the tough judges who would rip apart their favorites if it came down to it. Defer to knowledge over fame during this casting. I would rather hear Randy Jackson’s advice over Britney Spears any day. He actually has something to say, dog. Lastly, I’m going to pull a Seacrest and tell you that it’s up to us, America. Don’t casually watch all of the competition shows. They’ll over-saturate you and make you bitter reality show fans. Vary the topics of such shows. Find that balance in your TV calendar. My singing show is “The Voice.” My fish out of water situation show is “Survivor.” I throw in some skill based competitions like “The Ultimate Fighter” and “Top Shot.” And the off-season “So You Think You Can Dance” occupies the summer. That seems like a lot when you write it down, but most of them run at different points in the year so it doesn’t occupy a terrible amount of time.

Call me old-fashioned, but I think the formulaic competition shows still have the jump on the Kardashians and Housewives. Maybe if those shows added an elimination element, they’d be more reasonable to watch. “This week your votes decide which Kardashian gets eliminated from the family.” I think I’ll stick with my well organized television schedule instead.

"Game of Thrones" Premiere: A Storm of Swords and a Million Characters

The air is just a little bit warmer. Spring is coming and this is “Game of Thrones” season. It’s a bit ironic since the show’s first family, the Starks, live by the warning that “winter is coming.” Here in the United States, so very far from Westeros, the show’s March/April premieres mark the beginning of what amounts to a 10 week film festival. We get 10 one-hour movies that pretend to be television episodes with massive storylines and even bigger budgets. The following contains spoilers from the 3/31 episode.

The premiere showed us just how huge this season is going to be. The show has always switched between a number of stories presented from the perspectives of different central characters. That continues, but on what seems like a much bigger scale. At risk of forgetting some, the audience gets the perspectives of Jon, Sam, Tyrion, Bronn, Sansa, Margaery, Daenerys, Davos and Robb. Plus we never even got to Arya, Brann and Theon. Over the next few weeks some of these characters will definitely take a back seat to those who prove more important, but there are so many perspectives for our first episode back to the seven kingdoms. I need a bit of time to remember my Dothraki from my dire wolves.

I don’t think I’ll get that time though as conflict is fiercely brewing on many fronts. Tyrion confronts two of his always charming relatives in a pair of scenes that show the imp’s fall from power since the Battle of Blackwater. After attempting to keep pace with Queen Cersei through insults that lacked the confidence of last season, he gets completely reamed out by his father, Tywin. Something tells me, Tyrion isn’t just going to take the insults lying down. Peter Dinklage (Tyrion) and Charles Dance (Tywin) are amazing in the scene, the most compelling of the night.

North of the Wall, Jon Snow meets one of our new characters, Mance Rayder the king beyond the wall. Jon persuades him that he means to betray the Night’s Watch with a fairly unconvincing performance. This is how it goes down.

Why would we trust you, Jon Snow?

Um, well because you should.

Okay, let’s give you weapons.

But if the wildlings turned around and cut off the bastard of Winterfell’s head in the first episode of the season the audience would lose our view of what Mance Rayder is up to. So fine, they believe him.

Across the Narrow Sea, Daenerys is on a fishing trip with her dragons. The dragons do all the fishing, the Dothraki throw up all over the boat and Daenerys doesn’t do much of anything. Eventually she and Ser Jorah hit dry land and look into buying an army. The seller mutters insults in a different language before arguing the necessity of male nipples with Daenerys. He goes on to cut off one of the soldier’s nipples to show how tough the army is. I bet that soldier went on to die from an infected nipple hole. But we’ll probably never know for sure.

Ultimately the mother of dragons gets dooped by a warlock disguised as a little girl. Luckily Ser Jorah hasn’t figured out they’ve been followed by a very suspicious looking cloaked figure. The warlock lets out a creepy bug or something that tries to kill Daenerys. But she is saved by the cloaked man. He turns out to be Sir Barristan Selmy, the storied knight fired by Joffrey. So that’s where he wandered off to. Good to know. After setting a strong first impression saving the would-be queen from a painful death, he pledges himself to her.

Ultimately, the first episode proves to be a fun return to “Game of Thrones.” There is a ton of information to digest before next Sunday. Plus episode two will probably show us the remaining characters that were left out this week. So it will be like a second season premiere.

Admittedly we haven’t seen much action yet. Sam and Ghost got into it with a white walker and there was the already mentioned nipple cutting action, but I anticipate some fights soon. “Game of Thrones” is always a slow burn though. So they weren’t going to play all their cards in week one. But we saw some dragons, white walkers, a giant!, and got to catch up with all our buddies from Westeros. We find out Davos didn’t die in King’s Landing, Ser Barristan is still fighting, and Robb and Tyrion are mad at their parents. So far so good.

"Survivor" Goes Crazy

“Survivor” isn’t pulling the ratings it once was. But what show is in their 26th season? As a fan for all 26 of those rice eating, torch-snuffing installments, I know that the seasons fluctuate in entertainment value. The latest, “Survivor Caramoan: Fans vs. Favorites” falls on the plus side for me so far. But it’s clear from the generally negative commenters on the show’s facebook and other sites, that some people aren’t digging the tribe of misfits billed as favorites.

Well last night we had a season defining moment when Brandon Hantz got so worked up he dumped out his tribe’s rice and beans while launching a verbal assault aimed at fellow crazy person, Phillip Sheppard. Basically he was annoyed that Phillip considered himself the leader and wanted everyone to fall in line. But that’s part of “Survivor.” Let the delusional people think what they want. But Brandon couldn’t take it. It was a very real moment to see how the tribe interacted as the two loudest competed to be the most annoying player of the season. Well maybe second after epically useless Shamar who went home last week.

But as this whole episode played out, I couldn’t help but realize that I was on Brandon’s side. The guy clearly has some kind of personality disorder. But he had a point about Phillip treating the others like children. So when the tribes showed up for what looked like an exciting immunity challenge, good ol’ Jeff Probst had to go prying and ask why the favorites looked so miserable. What followed was more shouting and Probst calming Brandon by very creepily rubbing his shoulders for five awkward minutes. Without further ado, the favorites voted Brandon out in an impromptu tribal council after forfeiting the challenge.

History tells us that the following weeks don’t go well when a team forfeits immunity. That would make sense since the show has been heavily pushing how badly the fans are getting beaten week after week. But beyond that, I think the excitement level has definitely spiked. Brandon called out Phillip for both tribes to hear in addition to exposing those who had been working on team Hantz (Dawn, Andrea, Erik). That could mean nothing or everything depending on how the favorites recover next week. I’ll leave you with some glaring questions. Will Phillip change his approach after being embarrassed? Can the fans recover enough to survive until the merge? Most importantly, why was Jeff massaging Brandon for so long?

“King of the Nerds": What Did We Just Watch?

Without going in to actual numbers, the amount that TBS plays reruns of “The Big Bang Theory” would lead me to believe that they pull solid ratings. So the next logical decision was to make a reality show starring a bunch of real life nerds. It was? Well that’s the premise of “King of the Nerds,” which just completed its first season on the comedy heavy network.

The show stars 11 “nerds” competing against each other in nerdy competitions to see who will reign supreme. In the meantime, they live in a big old mansion outfitted with a comic book’s store worth of superhero statues and Rubik’s Cubes. Nerd-vana, as its called, also apparently has a lot of alcohol because throughout the season even the most even-tempered nerds got a bit screwy.

Season one casting consisted of some impressive geeks. There was a NASA engineer, a master computer hacker, a gaming champion, fantasy writer and the list goes on. But few of those skills actually seemed to help in the respective “nerd war” and “nerd off” challenges. For example, the gaming challenge consisted of contestants guiding a remote control hovercraft through obstacles. That’s a little different than if they played Mario Kart to decide who wins.

But no matter what, this is reality television. So a few crazies dominated airtime. Danielle, a pink haired gamer and apparently a self-obsessed nut, spent all eight episodes whining about how much she hates everyone and how amazing she is. Then there was the nice, but insane Genevieve, who was labeled a threat and cried every time it came up. But otherwise she hopped around singing Disney songs and screamed at the top of her lungs whenever her team won. These are just really enjoyable people. Sarcasm.

I don’t want to mislead you though. There were plenty of pleasant people. Moogega, a NASA engineer was (almost) always well spoken and reasonable. There was that one time she got really drunk and told America that she “loves sex.” Awkward. And Brandon, a neuro-scientist, was incredibly nice on-air. With the glasses and tucked in dress shirt of a classic nerd, Brandon congratulated the others when they beat him and was generally just pleased to be included in the cast. I’m confident that selective memory will cause us to remember these positives when the second season closes in.

Shot on a California college campus, the show would have benefitted from more time spent outside with challenges. Instead, the majority of the episodes had the players just sitting inside. But that’s what nerds do apparently; sit around in a pit of unmade beds and takeout food containers while ignoring the social norms of human interaction. Good to know.

Most of the challenges played out quickly and straightforward. Viewers with a pretty good working knowledge of reality television will have been able to predict a fair amount of the results. This is a physics challenge and everyone assumes a certain player will dominate? Well guess what, they lose. Someone is a Sudoku expert and they know they’re going to win? Well too bad the other team pulls out a miraculous victory. It’s reality 101 and TBS fails to build much drama. Having Revenge of the Nerds alumni Curtis Armstrong and Robert Carradine hosting the spectacle also goes along with how the show sacrifices drama for self-deprecating humor. In fact, some of their in-challenge comments prove to be the funniest moments of the whole series.

:Spoiler Alert: The finale ended with Celeste, a self-conscious video game champion appealing to her fellow nerds’ humanity with the final full cast vote. Facing off against Genevieve, the annoying one I mentioned earlier, it was the classic heavyweight vs. under-the-radar final two. But after the whole show talks about how these nerds were outcast and bullied throughout life, is a popularity contest really the best way to pick the winner? This is like 10th grade gym class all over again.

The credits rolled accompanied by a call to action for nerds to apply for season two. But if the players are any more annoying than this year’s, the show will be unwatchable. So do us a favor TBS. Let’s keep the certifiable weirdos out of nerd-vana. I liked this season. It reminded me of going to the comic book store.

The Throwback: Firefly

The Throwback is a feature that reviews past films and television shows in a modern context. Even with all the new projects we watch, it's always fun to look back on what once was on the big and small screen. The Throwback is our way to do so.

Here is your position. You have either never heard of “Firefly” or you are absolutely obsessed with it. Sure you may fall somewhere in between, but you’re a rarity. Joss Whedon’s doomed sci-fi western show aired over a few short months in 2002 and was cancelled by Fox after 11 episodes aired. There’s been a bunch of network shows that were cancelled this season and I can’t even remember their names. But “Firefly” survived through an unlikely cult following that developed. There was even a major movie developed by Whedon with the same characters in 2005, but that’s a story for another Throwback, which you’ll likely see soon enough.

I could summarize the show’s concept, but I’ll let Captain Malcolm Reynolds (Nathan Fillion) do it.

“Here's how it is: The Earth got used up, so we moved out and terraformed a whole new galaxy of Earths. Some rich and flush with the new technologies, some not so much. The Central Planets, them’s formed the Alliance, waged war to bring everyone under their rule; a few idiots tried to fight it, among them myself. I'm Malcolm Reynolds, captain of Serenity. She's a transport ship; Firefly class. Got a good crew: fighters, pilot, mechanic. We even picked up a preacher for some reason, and a bona fide companion. There's a doctor, too, took his genius sister outta some Alliance camp, so they're keepin' a low profile. You understand. You got a job, we can do it, don't much care what it is. “

Trusty IMDb provides that quote that aired at the beginning of a number of episodes. But it merely provides the backdrop for what the show is about. Whedon took a number of archetype characters, found the perfect actors and somehow built a team that has more life than the USS Enterprise, are more relatable than the Jedi and so compatible that it becomes totally believable when the mercenary (Adam Baldwin) is bench pressing with the preacher (Ron Glass). The first few episodes run slow, but the reward comes with how connected the viewer becomes in the subsequent chapters.

The series never fully hit its stride while on the air and many of the episodes are stand-alone story-arcs still presenting the setting and situations that exist in this world, or more appropriately, worlds. But like most hour long dramas, the moments that paint a bigger picture of the series are what get fans hooked. The alliance gets close to catching Simon (Sean Maher) and River (Summer Glau) on a few occasions. One of those times comes at the hand of a Serenity crew member. Fillion’s performance that follows as Mal confronts him makes Han Solo look as gentle as an Ewok. Also the team encounters Reavers, cannibalistic men, who cut up their own skin and terrorize the outer planets. Mal’s unintentional wife also makes up a multi-episode arc.

I am of a firm belief that characters guide narratives. Everything else is secondary if the audience is presented with strong individuals. “Firefly” is a perfect example of this. This could be set in a nursing home as Mal and Wash (Alan Tudyk) bicker over dominos. It probably wouldn’t be as exciting, but it would still be compelling. As it is, the show has the characters living on a spaceship in a galaxy where Earth’s two dominant cultures, Chinese and American (or more specifically cowboys) have merged into one. Okay, now that’s compelling.

The Throwback: The O.C. Season 1

The Throwback is a feature that reviews past films and television shows in a modern context. Even with all the new projects we watch, it's always fun to look back on what once was on the big and small screen. The Throwback is our way to do so.

The year was 2003 and we didn’t know it, but we were aching for a teen drama to define us high schoolers and undergrads who had survived Y2K. Like "90210" and "Dawson’s Creek" before it, “The O.C.” tugged at the audience’s heart strings with heavy teen romance and drama that only the most dysfunctional could claim as their own. All of this went down with the sunny backdrop of the rich and famous in Newport Beach, California.

The success of “The O.C.” can be seen prominently in watching back season one almost ten years after its airing. The initial run of episodes beats the audience over the head with certain themes and concepts that are even more blatant when watching episodes back to back. But after Ryan and the crew return from Tijuana in episode seven, the series settles into the storytelling that makes it memorable.

The show follows Ryan Atwood (Ben McKenzie) as he integrates into Newport after being taken in by a socially conscious rich family, the Cohens. Sandy Cohen, (Peter Gallagher) his wife Kirsten, (Kelly Rowan) and their son, the sarcastic nerd with style, Seth (Adam Brody) act as the conscience of the town while frequently straying from the path themselves. The foils of the Cohens, the Coopers, live next door and fall in and out of favor with the audience in every episode.

Fans of “The O.C.” identify story lines as semi-independent sagas and everyone has their favorites. Season one has some of the most memorable with Ryan squaring off against both Luke, (Chris Carmack) who then turns into a fan favorite and Oliver, (Taylor Handley) the spoiled kid with mental issues. Seth goes back and forth between girlfriends with Summer (Rachel Bilson) and Anna (Samaire Armstrong) and the audience opens the book on how dysfunctional the extended Cohen family is.

It’s worth noting that the fashions and musical choices in season one have not aged well. But as a show that prided itself on being in the forefront of both at the time, it’s not “The O.C.’s” fault that indie rock has gone back underground and pants have gotten tighter. The show is fun for those who experienced it first hand and those of a similar age experiencing the DVDs for the first time. If you haven’t watched yet, it might be a good time to prepare you for the summer through theirs that lasts 365 days a year. When you’re ready, Luke will be waiting in episode one with his arms wide, “Welcome to the O.C., bitch.”