11/29/04

Fear Factor (Best Friends), NBC
Las Vegas, NBC

Fear Factor (Best Friends), NBC

I don’t make a habit of watching “reality” shows, but the first thing seems to be that if there’s any chance of some skin being shown, the chicks have to be totally stacked, and the producer has to use any means necessary to show off cleavage. FLAT-CHESTED WOMEN NEED NOT APPLY. This particular Fear Factor was about best friends competing together. One team of best friends met at the plastic surgeon’s office, where one worked and one was a client. If you didn’t have that knowledge, you’d assume the two are related as they have the same nose and breasts. Four sets of two best friends, two women’s teams, and two men’s teams. Whenever possible, the women are in jogbras or less. The guys, they can be fit, but seem to have no buff requirement, and don’t have to have breasts at all. Besides, it’s better to outfit them in baggy clothes that might only reveal some bicep and calf. And the first of the “tests” that the teams had to do entailed getting in water. When the women prepared to get in the pool, it turned out they had skimpy bikinis under the athletic outfits.

One of the things that bug me about such television is how the lure of some free money ($50,000 in this case) brings out the worst in people (maybe this is why people watch; they want to see real ugliness on parade). The host, Joe Rogan, who got that position by means unknown, worked hard at hectoring the contestants, calling them worthless and encouraging them to meanly criticize their best friend. And most complied. The surgically-enhanced women criticized each other to the point of asking how they could be friends if one couldn’t suck up leeches from a tank, carry them to a hole in a wall, spit them into the friend’s mouth, who transfers them to another bowl. He also encouraged the contestants to trash-talk the other teams, which they did poorly. When the contestants weren’t rough enough in the trash talk, he showed a highlight reel of one men’s team engaging in excessive hugging. After running that, he got the other contestants to try more lame zingers about men hugging.

Guess there was supposed to be a build-up in drama as the show went on. $50k was on the line. I don’t see how people care enough to watch. Maybe I’m supposed to put myself in the contestants’ shoes and think about how much better I’d be than them. Not swallowing that line.


Las Vegas, NBC

Here’s the idea session behind this show. A glitzy Las Vegas casino is run by a gruff-talking heart of gold guy, who can be rough but really works hard for "good." He’s surrounded by two hunky ex-police-type tough guys and all three are helped along by slinkily-dressed dames, one of whom is the casino-owners daughter (genius, but flaky), another the long-suffering girlfriend of one of the hunks (good looking AND practical), another wise-cracking (dark past she loves to talk around), and the last a good natured foreigner. They take people’s money, dress well, engage in pointless banter, and fight crime.

The crime-fighting casino owner is a new thing, but it’s really a riff on the private detective show, as the casino is equipped with better spying equipment than the government could ever possess, and because the casino owner and his henchmen aren’t cops, they can kick some ass because they’re so righteous.

Adding to this mix is James Caan as the owner. He seems weary, possibly because the plots are so painfully contrived and the acting so amateurish, but it could just as easily be because we recognize him as an older Sonny Corleone, who is now stealing his money legitimately, and still bashing heads, but only of criminals.