Tuesday, May 29, 2007 Rant Archive
Dear Garry Marshall,
You are so wise and talented. You have had a long, legendary career. You basically made Julia Roberts a star. I admire the fact that you want to mentor young directors, but can’t the Director’s Guild just send you some trainees? Isn’t there a golf tournament you could be playing somewhere, or a film festival over which you could preside? Because, frankly, your pearls of wisdom are wasted in the excruciating show, ON THE LOT.
The nerve of Fox! The absolute nerve! I just spent an hour of my life essentially watching a recap of last night’s episode of ON THE LOT. I know that they need time for “America” to vote, but really? It’s annoying when AMERICAN IDOL does it, but that show has earned the right. ON THE LOT has not. A whole hour of being introduced, then re-introduced to the eighteen finalists? No, you read that right. The contestants, arranged in three rows, are introduced briefly, and then introduced again when Adrianna Costa, the hostess, tells them whether they are staying or going. See what the show made me do? Now I am going all repetitive.
Ahh, the perils of living a complete lie. With every week that passes on THE RICHES, you can just feel the walls closing in on our favorite faux family, and the combination of neighbors, co-workers and creepy cousin Dale make some sort of admission from the clan inevitable.
Doug’s friend Pete comes to visit, which means the Riches have decisions to make. Do they try to carry on the con, or do they run and hide? No, they just pretend they don’t even know who the Riches are, much to Pete’s surprise. In true family fashion, the ruse -- which includes Dahlia posing as the real Doug’s ex-wife on the phone and grandma nearly giving things away with her senility -- goes way too far and poor Pete finds himself in the middle of an emotional breakdown.
The second episode of Mark Burnett and Steven Spielberg’s filmmaking-competition reality show, ON THE LOT, finds the contestants debuting their one-minute comedy shorts. The judges, Carrie Fisher, the venerable Garry Marshall, and DISTURBIA’s D. J. Caruso, are sticklers for plot arcs in the short films, as well they should. The problem is that the show, ON THE LOT, has no arc of it’s own. It yearns for a climax! Carrie and Garry sniping, Paula-and-Simon-style, would have worked beautifully. By the end I was almost asleep, praying that I wouldn’t have to watch anymore short films anytime soon. As for the films, I guess some were OK. Others just sucked. But there is no build at all. I guess they are trying to save some bang for the results show, which airs Tuesday night.
Instead of WHAT NOT TO WEAR it’s WHO NOT TO MARRY. Instead of THE BACHELOR it’s THE DIVORCEE. And when Angie Everhart shows up on your lawn to ask why you were mean to your ex, it’s not FEAR FACTOR, it’s EX-WIVES CLUB.
Reality TV works best when it can explore human nature through real people either excelling at the artful and the fantastic (PROJECT RUNWAY, THE AMAZING RACE) or sacrificing integrity and sense of self for fame and fortune (BIG BROTHER, NANNY 911). TV executives screw this all up when they salivate over the bad taste elements and try and make up for that with slapping some quick-fix guru into the mix and calling the whole event “empowering.” And that is exactly what ABC’s EX-WIVES CLUB is billed as, “An empowering new reality series.”