Silly Little Country

Back to Reality (TV!)

My weekend was a bit sucked up by other things than the Amazing Race and Dancing With The Stars. Catching up with the latter last night was brutal, as my bicycle repair class in the evening forced me to watch the show from 11pm to 1am.
So first The Amazing Race. I just love the ingenuity of picking out local skills that will put the teams out of their comfort zones. The mud-gathering, the duck-herding. ABC is doing a lot with the Amazing Race people to set up a story, or many stories; I especially liked the theme, I suspect staged, of the poker players pretending basically to be social workers and getting exposed. I loved the gay brothers and the staging of the interest of the hetero poker players being interested in the gay brothers.
For all that I love the structure. Having everyone fly desperately to arrive as contestants on a Japanese game show surely let ABC deal with a Japanese network for a common show. And watching people walk in Tokyo was a riot.
Now on to DWTS, another case of comfort zones. I won't be watching it live (Eastern Time Zone) this fall but I love it. I find stunning how the judges can give wildly different assessments and the same score. Or at best or worst a marginally different score. I think the standouts were those scored last night as standouts and worry a bit about who will be tossed tonight. I want to keep most of the Slavs, who seem the most fun!
Anyway, the season has begun!

posted by Alan Adamson @ 4:46 PM