Entries Tagged 'Television' ↓

I think we started watching The Singing Bee because we'd just wrapped up seeing Joey Fatone every week on Dancing with the Stars and he caught our eye in the commercials.  I didn't even know until after it started that there's another show, Don't Forget the Lyrics, which is basically the exact same concept only with much more complicated rules.

Singing Bee is growing on me.  I mean, come on, how awesome is a show that uses Nirvana's "Smells Like Teen Spirit" for the opening round?  Isn't that the song whose lyrics are so famously garbled that MTV used to run scrolling text at the bottom of the video?  I was really hoping for someone to bust out the line "A mulatto, an albino, a mosquito, my libido!" but they actually went with a different line that I can't remember.

The show's got all the elements of a winner (except one, which I'll get to in a second):

1. Contestants are chosen at pseudo-random from the audience, and then immediately whittled down from 6 to 4 in a quick singing contest.  You can immediately bond with the ones chosen and decide who you like.  Compare that to something like Deal or No Deal (or Identity, or Bingo Night…) where there's one contestant who was basically hand picked by the producers because she's not afraid to act like an idiot on television, and you just don't care.  You either want her to win or you don't.  But when there's 4 contestants you can pick your favorite.
2. You can play along.  They're picking songs that everybody knows.  Question-driven shows will almost always have categories where you say "Oh, I have no idea" and then you don't have a shot.
3. Each round lasts long enough that you can cheer for your favorite.  Last night during one of the games a contestant had to sing long enough to fill in 15 blanks in a song, and she did it perfectly.  With each word you're thinking "Wow, she's good, she's going to do the whole song!"  Meanwhile her opponent got almost every word wrong.
4. Speaking of which, if somebody gets it wrong, it has room to be funny.  Like when the Nirvana music stops and the guy sings, "I'm so stupid, I don't know this!"
5. Variety.  I've heard everything from Sweet Home Alabama to Mickey ("Oh Mickey you're so fine…") to, well, Nirvana.  You don't get bored.  You may not like every song, but chances are you know every song.
6. The rules are easy.  Each round is basically "We'll sing part of a song, you sing the rest."  It appears they vary the middle game, which I like.  One week it was "We will jumble up the words in front of you and you have to rearrange them" (which sounds hard!), this week it was "You have to fill in the blank words."  Compare this to Don't Forget the Lyrics, which has been described as a combination of Jeopardy and Who Wants to Be A Millionaire, complete with choosing your own category, having lifelines, escalating prize levels, etc…  Makes me think of that "Bamboozled" game from Friends where you had to go through the mudpit to enter the Golden Hut and pull the monkey's tail.

The one problem I have with the game right now is that it's too easy.  I've seen two episodes, and both times somebody won that $50k prize.  Remember when Millionaire first came out?  You know what made that such a huge hit?  That it took forever for someone to will the million dollars.  When somebody finally won, it made the news.  So when you've got a game where somebody wins the big prize every week, you don't get the same anticipation that comes with "Wow, she was so close…maybe someone will get it next week."

Check it out.  It's a fun show.  Not sure it's going to be a runaway hit like a Millionaire (or Dancing with the Stars), but it's great for a summer night's television watching.

Well the report is out (at least the rushed, preliminary one) on what drugs they found in the bodies of Chris, Nancy and Daniel Benoit. And there's really not much new evidence, short of two things:

• There doesn't appear to be any overt evidence of steroids. Just testosterone, which we knew he was on.
• Daniel, the son, was sedated with Xanax.

So at least that hopefully answers one question. We were all most horrified at the thought of what happened to the son – did he know what happened to his mom? Did he know what his dad was going to do to him? The answer appears to be, mercifully, no.

Back in 2003 there was a very bizarre story (that made some "most bizarre way to die" lists) about the pizza delivery man who was forced to rob a bank on behalf of some other criminals who had kidnapped him and attached a live bomb around his neck. While the police waited for the bomb squad to arrive, the bomb went off. Apparently not a hoax, indeed!

Well, people have finally been indicted. And you know what? It appears that the guy was in on it. Ok, follow the details, because they are messed up:

1. "Wells" is the guy that blew up. "Barnes", one of the two people who are charged with the crime, was a fishing buddy of Wells. "Armstrong", a female who is also charged, is listed as a friend of Barnes.
2. The original plan was to get the money so that Armstrong could hire someone to kill her father.
3. The plan was to set it up so that if Wells was caught, he could claim to be an unwilling participant.
4. As apparently an added benefit, the bomb also ensured that Wells could not keep the money for himself. "If he dies, he can't be a witness." No honor among thieves, apparently. Who would volunteer for that deal?
5. Armstrong (who wanted the money to kill her father, got it?) was already in jail after police found the body of James Roden, her boyfriend. She has already confessed to killing Roden because he knew about the robbery.
6. Roden's body was found in a home near the place where Wells had made his last pizza delivery. The guy that owned the home has since died of cancer.

Got all that? If somebody wrote that all up as an episode of Law and Order, the producers would say "No way, too confusing."

Since the Vince McMahon death angle was scrapped (and we all know why), the natural question now turns from "who did it" to "who would have done it, if they'd gone through with it." Well the news is out on how it would have gone down.

I'd just like to say that I predicted that. Not like it was hard. I would not have chosen Mr. Kennedy as an accomplice, though – but maybe if they'd had a few more weeks of him turning heel and dedicating his actions to the memory of Vince we would have gotten the idea. The story linked above does not say why Vince faked his own death, though. I wonder if I was right, that it was a test of loyalty? Another reason for him to come back and screw all the faces that didn't show him enough love.

As you can tell, I got a little overloaded with the Benoit news and decided that it was too depressing to keep writing about every little detail. Several times I've tried to write something to sum up the story, but nothing seems adequate.

Meanwhile, sometimes it's nice to get a little smirk or even a smile. I love to read my referrer logs from the search engines. Most, of course, are variations on "chris benoit", sometimes spelled "benwa" like the ball :). One of the more unusual ones, though, was "chris benoit killed kevin sullivan." That's…different. For starters, Kevin Sullivan is alive and well and has been interviewed a few times regarding the story :). I think perhaps they meant it the other way around, as I have seen several people trying to tie Kevin Sullivan (Nancy's ex-husband) to the murder.

Even in the storylines back in the day, I don't recall Kevin Sullivan ever actually killing anybody. I do remember him raising a couple of people from the dead, and having a stable of bizarre, satanic creatures to do his bidding (of which Nancy was one, by the way, playing "Fallen Angel" and eventually "Woman"). But as a general rule, pro wrestling storylines never got into fake death. Ironically, of course, that's exactly what Vince McMahon was doing just a couple of weeks ago, and in the span of that time two wrestlers (Benoit, but also Sensational Sherri Martel) have died.

There's a new bachelor-like show on Monday nights called Age Of Love. The gimmick? Half the women vying for the affections of the 30yr old bachelor are in their 40's, and half are in their 20's. Which will he choose?

Thus far (two episodes) the production alone has been pretty lopsided, going well out of the way to make the 40yr olds look sad and pitiful (talking mostly about heartbreak and how they hope it is not too late for them), but making the 20yr olds seem entirely shallow and stupid ("I'm hot, deal with it"). As a 38yr old it's actually pretty painful to even listen to the 20somethings talk. But then again, I can't even imagine the amount of plastic surgery that went into the 48yr old (who I believe was the one that claimed "good genetics").

The producers will probably ruin the concept by making him eliminate one woman from each group every time, in order to keep it even. Once he has entirely eliminated one group, after all, the "experiment" is proven. So they have to pretend like he likes one 20yr old and one 40yr old equally and then has to make up his mind.

Eh. It's still better than Ex Wives Club. :)!

The latest I've found:

A law enforcement official close to the investigation says pro wrestler Chris Benoit strangled his wife and smothered his son before hanging himself in his weight room.

I don't know what to say.

TV Squad has the info, straight from Zach Braff's mouth:

• Just because he's dating doesn't make him the jerk the gossip rags are making him out to be.
• Yes, he is the new voice of Wendy's. Man, I thought that was him, but I couldn't believe it. What an odd gig.
• Scrubs starts filming its final 18 episodes in August. So I guess that's good news that it's definitely coming back and sad news that it's definitely the last round.

A number of news sources have the story now that the sheriff has all but confirmed that Chris Benoit killed his wife and child sometime during the weekend, and then killed himself on Monday. WWE itself also claims to have evidence that they have been asked to keep silent about, for now. While awaiting the crime lab results, the sheriff did say that the details as they come out will be "a little bizarre."

Knowing absolutely nothing about Benoit's personal and family life, it is easy to throw out guesses about what could have happened. Did Nancy want to divorce him and take away his son? I am honestly hoping that it's more like "Something happened that caused Nancy to try to kill herself and their son, Chris was home trying to save them, and when he could not do so, he also committed suicide." But nobody is reporting a triple suicide, they're all very plainly saying that the evidence is for murder. And they've already said that there's no shotgun or stabbing wounds, which rules out the sort of crime of passion argument where someone's waving a gun and the next thing you know people are dead. If reports are true that Benoit had told people his wife and child were "throwing up blood", then that certainly lends credit to the belief that they were poisoned. (It sounds very twisted to say, but I suppose it is possible that he poisoned them, and then missed his flight while waiting for them to die. Yikes.)

I think I'm going to stop guessing and see what the news reports have to say. Oh, one last thing. My local news sucks. While running the story this morning they said, "Despite the murder, WWE ran a three hour tribute to Benoit last night." Ummm…morons…yesterday nobody knew the details, they just knew that their coworker was dead. You can't exactly fault them for that. Idiots.

I don't really follow the WWE pay per views, but I do follow the "sheets" that give the update on matches. I noticed last night that Benoit would miss the Vengeance PPV because he had to fly home for a "family emergency."

Apparently he, his wife Nancy, and their child have all been found dead. Holy sh*t. No more news is currently available, although you'd have to guess at some sort of murder/suicide thing – the question is who started it.

Long time wrestling fans might recall Benoit's wife Nancy as the character Woman, former protege of Kevin Sullivan. They had some classic battles in WCW using their own real life feud as fodder for some memorable television.

It's hard to explain to a non wrestling fan what it means when something like this happens. I mean, let's be honest, I'm 38 years old and I've watched wrestling for all my life. I don't buy the merchandise, or the pay per views. It's just a sort of Monday night habit I've never really kicked. Now imagine for a minute that there's someone you see every week. Every single week, for, oh, call it 20 years. There's really nothing that can compare to that. No television show does it justice – they tape, they rerun. Wrestling is live every week. No movie star can compare – they have stunt men, they get up and climb back in their trailers until they're needed again. Pro wrestlers put on the show that they do, live, every week, because it's what they're born to do. Sometimes they go away for awhile, sure. They're injured, they're written out of story lines. You don't hear from them for months. And then one day when you least expect it, their entrance music kicks in and you get honest to god shivers down your spine. Not because I'm screaming at my television "Kill him, Chris! Get him!!" Of course we know it's fixed, of course we know who "wins". It's not about that. It's about knowing that the guy walking down the aisle is about to put on a damned entertaining show for me, and I appreciate that.

Men like Chris Benoit (and his longtime closest friend Eddie Guerrero) were the sort who redefined what it meant to be great at what they did. Chris Benoit absolutely transcended what it means to be a professional wrestler these days. He wasn't among the circus of "dead men" and "degeneration X" and other gimmicks and story lines. You want to know the Chris Benoit storyline? He was the best wrestler there was. Prove him wrong. In a business where people got over almost entirely on their monster physiques or their movie star microphone work (the Rock, anyone?), Chris Benoit held his own entirely on his wrestling talent and intensity.

I can't even wrap my brain around what it means for him to be gone. Eddie Guerrero died last year. That, too, was a tragedy. But to put it in context? Honestly? Eddie Guerrero had a long time history of messing his body up pretty badly with drugs. It was not a surprise to many people when he died. Benoit died suddenly, unexpectedly and tragically, along with his entire family. The magnitude of that is inconceivable.

The show's on now. I'm going to stop typing and start appreciating the memories. RIP, Crippler. I hope you get to see your friend Eddie again.