Hmmm… Cuckoo pants

The song is called Walking Next to You by a band called Acres. I had a hard time finding it too.

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.