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Monday, June 28, 2010

Must See TV?

Hey peeps! I know it's late, but I had my writers group tonight and needed to work on the piece I was presenting during the day. Of course, it is still Monday and I never attached any specific time caveat to my promise... Go ahead and check, all you legal fanatics. [Ducks is huge with the "legal fanatic" crowd, I assume.]

Anyhow, here we are. Yep.

They say that showing up is 80% of success. (Actually, "they" is "Woody Allen.") I have to disagree. I'm here, but it still feels like this is requiring a lot more effort on my behalf than just 20%.

Of course, the Ducks is all about giving a very cliched 110%. (So maybe I need to contribute more like 30%.)

You know, NBC's television show "100 Questions" must have taken that Woody Allen quote a little too much to heart. ("Genius segue!" says the masses. "Thank you," says I.)

On Friday, I had promised the revelation of one of the worst shows I have ever seen. "100 Questions" takes the cake. (Who really offers cake as a prize? If so, that is an incredibly lame contest. I mean, they should be serving cake as the prize is handed out. At least, that's how civilized people do it. Anything less is cruel and unusual.)

Now, back in 1997 -- for all you hip young kids, the world was still around back then -- I remember watching one night of NBC's Must See TV with my college roommate at the time. For those keeping score at home, it was Baloo (once again, not the Disney character).

Well, we watched some show between Seinfeld and Friends (or whatever) and it might have entailed a restaurant or pizza place of some sort, but after it was done, we established that -- in spite of the not-so-subtle cues from the laugh track -- there was literally no point which made us want to smile or laugh.

It was so bad that Baloo wore black for a month thereafter. I started listening to The Cure and lost my zest for life. Later I got my zest back, as is recorded in the award-winning documentary "How Stella Got Her Groove Back." (As you probably suspected, that movie is about me.)

100 Questions tops the magnitude of the suckage that was "that one other show." (I have no idea what it was called and only remembered just now, while writing this, that it had something to do with a restaurant.)

For a tv show to be watchable, you probably shouldn't hate all the characters so much that you want them to die horrific, violent deaths. The writers of 100 Questions do not understand this complicated premise.

Also, good acting -- or at least "acting better than that found in most kindergarten plays" -- would probably help. Now, acting is a skill and I'm not saying that I can do it better than the actors featured on the show. I'm just saying that I hope they were doing it pro bono.

There must be some silver lining to the show, though. I mean, there isn't much in life that is all bad. Actually, this calls for a list!

List of Things That Are All Bad
  • Torture: Never acceptable
  • Rape: See Torture
  • NBC's 100 Questions: Zero goodness

Okay, so maybe it is all bad. The production values of the show are exceeded by videos found on YouTube and created by men and women without Hollywood budgets.

I follow some very talented individuals here in the blogosphere. I don't mean to exclude anyone, so please do not misconstrue this list as comprehensive, but: Kathryn (From the Inside... Out), Moooooog35 (Mental Poo), Sara (Sara Spelled Without An H), and the Straight Guy/Gay Guy team (Gay Guy / Straight Guy) are all incredibly hilarious.

If NBC was smart, and I don't mean to imply that they aren't (but they did greenlight "100 Questions"...), they would have hired those guys to write something decent for that show.

Wednesday's post: Heroic High School Cross Country Exploits

Editor's Note: It's late, I'm tired and I will possibly edit this in the morning. I apologize if this post isn't up to usual Ducks quality, but the aforementioned tiredness has certainly played a role in that. I'm taking a self-induced pay cut over it. (Let's see, 50% of 0 is...)

9 comments:

  1. Why don't I remember that show? I watched a lot of TV in the 90s.

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  2. M.P. - I think they only aired one episode, maybe two. It was atrocious, though, and you should be thankful you didn't catch it.

    As a thought, I should have offered a new contest for anyone who can come up with the name. The only problem is that since I don't actually remember it, you all would have to trust my ability to recognize it when I read it (which, actually, I'm fairly good at doing).

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  3. That was funny. Seriously. Not seriously funny. It was actually laugh-out-loud funny. I was serious when I said it was funny, though.

    Totally missed "100 Questions...." Thankfully. Maybe it's the show I saw an ad for. They ask you questions and if you get the answer right, they throw your prize off a tall building. Was that it? If so, I can't imagine it being at all funny.

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  4. I kinda knew that "How Stella Got Her Groove Back" was about you :)

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  5. I keep seeing that show on Hulu...thankfully I can tell utter tripe with one freeze frame.

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  6. ...yep, found it on Hulu:) Sad but, I'm betting that show would make the cut with today's audience and the reality TV craze.

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  7. Helen - Unfortunately, the "throw the prizes off the roof" show sounds like it has a better production value than this other one.

    Dez - If anyone was going to know that, of course it would be our beloved Hollywood Spy!!

    Summer - I hate to admit this, but I watched most of it. It was like a train wreck, only more tragic. I suppose I was mainly in disbelief that they would broadcast something like that.

    Elliot - Welcome aboard! Society is setting the bar pretty low with entertainment nowadays, huh? I have a theory on that... which seems like a good topic for my Friday post.

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  8. I don't care if you were tired....you sounded incredibly astute and remarkably intelligent when you suggested that we could do better writing than that show.

    And I say that w/o having actually seen aforementioned show. I DO know that there's a lot of really crappy tv out there...and it's nice to know which stuff to avoid.

    I'm raising you to 40% for this one...

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  9. I caught about 15 minutes of "100 Questions" last week. Your assessment is spot on. Utter Crap. I think the show you caught back in the 90's was called "Two Guys, a Girl and a Pizza Place." I never saw the show outside of advertisements. But, I do know that it is where we got Ryan Reynolds. As the Ducks are fond of mocking Canadians and immediately regretting it, you might want to choose your side carefully on that one.

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