12/23/04

12/23/04--Punk’d, MTV
Las Vegas Bowl , ESPN (UCLA vs Wyoming)

Punk’d

I was looking forward to Punk’d. Two hours of it back to back to back to back. And I was getting in at the very beginning, the first episodes. And the beauty of the first episode is that it’s actually meta. Part of the first episode is about before the first episode. Pretty high concept. We get to see Ashton Kutcher punk’d. Getting punk’d means you’re pranked. A version of the Jamie Kennedy Experiment, MTV’s worst best friend reality show, and a bunch of others.

But the real concept is old. Candid Camera on celebrities. Well, mostly. The one punk’d setup I saw with non-celebrities was verging on mean. Well, they all verge on mean, but the “beauty” is that we get to see the rich and famous knocked down a bit. And they ostensibly benefit from the exposure. Oooh, Jeremy Sisto is accused of driving drunk by a cop. Or Chris Klein has a hostage situation going on in his house. These should work best when the build is slow, when things get more and more absurd to the point that there is no way the person being punk’d can believe that situation they’re in is real. The problem is that getting to that point takes forever. The posing by the show’s actors is convincing enough but not particularly interesting, and then the payoff is only good if the person being punk’d gets crazy at the end, swearing on camera and breaking stuff. Vivica Fox was reasonably good at being outraged, but it wasn’t really fun, because she took the prank seriously.

Some of the set-ups are just trying. When Ashton steals a car and fake crashes it into a storefront and then the punk’d subjects show up on the scene at 3:30am, it’s hard not to feel for the beleaguered celebs. By the end, I’m feeing for the viewer, who could have been darning socks.


Las Vegas Bowl

I don’t think I had heard of this bowl before. It’s certainly not in the exalted realm of the Rose Bowl. Probably a third-tier bowl. And it’s importance was demonstrated by the unpacked stands and third-tier announcing. I was waiting for James Caan to show up with plot-advancement babes and solve some crime.

The game was sufficiently slow and gave enough injury time outs, I had chance to read Time Magazine’s Man of the Year issue. The conceit of the issue is that the person so anointed generated the most news over the year. I’m fine with that. But I was aggravated by Time’s unqualified, unproven praise. The writing of the lead story was just terrible; they advanced a number of points on why Bush was worthy, then couldn’t prove them. They wrote he was specific in his proposals, that he told people things they didn’t want to hear, and yet the examples they gave and interview they published undermined those very points. When they questioned him, he was vague with answers, even though they lobbed him a softball by asking him about steroids in baseball. Yes, I know ‘roiding baseball players ranks with the war in Iraq, but still. When they gave examples of his ability to tell people what they didn’t want to hear, they told of how he didn’t answer a question about making mistakes in the second debate with Kerry. Turns out, after the debate, he sought out the woman who posed the question and explained how, of course he made mistakes, but he couldn’t answer the question for political reasons.

Time should have been bold enough to say Bush was the man of the year because he took the country from a small surplus to a huge deficit, because he pushed for a war with bogus evidence, because he didn’t have second thoughts about waging a war that majority of Americans are opposed to, because he eroded civil liberties, because he spends money the country doesn’t have like a drunk in Vegas while cutting taxes, and yet he was still elected to a second term.

I realize that game announcer predictions are less reliable than meteorologists divining tomorrow's weather by the tide, but it was impressive that the yakkers correctly predicted that the punt bouncing off the returner’s face mask was the turning point of the game. Even though Wyoming didn’t have a running game and was way behind, they got their act together for the win. Nice to see the underdog triumph, though UCLA might have been the real underdog, as their starting QB was lost to injury early on.