Adventures in Television
I watch a lot of TV, but nowadays the DVR allows me to watch only those shows that I really like. In the summertime, that's limited to only three or four shows. I rarely deviate from this pattern. Learning to like a new show takes far too much energy.
But recently, my TV reality received a dose of fresh air... if only for one night.
First of all, I DVRd an episode of this new Celebrity Family Feud show. It's basically the same old family feud, except for the set is a little more electronic, Al Roker is the host, and they have celebrities on the show instead of Sadie. On each episode, they have two initial matches, then the winners of those matches face each other, and then the winner of that match gets to play the bonus round. All the prizes go to charity.
Round one was the cast of the Office against a bunch of people from American Gladiators. It was relatively uneventful, and not as funny as I'd hoped (though it turns out that Meredith is actually kinda hot in real life, where she's an actress named Kate Flannery).
Round two was where it got strange. It was the Hickey family versus some random people from Camden County. Let me clarify. This was not half the cast of My Name is Earl against the other half of the cast of My Name is Earl. This was half the cast of My Name is Earl in character as Earl, Randy, Joy, Crabman (his nametag actually said "Crabman") and Catalina against some random recurring guest stars, including the dude from Son of the Beach (who was the team captain), the daytime hooker, the gay guy, and the foreign guy with the accent. They were all in full costume and none of them broke character.
Now, the Office characters weren't in character. Sure... Creed, Phyllis, and Oscar went by the names Creed, Phyllis, and Oscar. But that's because those are their real names. They still acted considerably more normal than their Dunder-Mifflin personalities (well, maybe not Creed). And Kate Flannery was on the show as Kate (not Meredith) and Brian Baumgartner was himself (not Kevin). And Al Roker was always Al Roker (or, as Randy called him, "Mr. Roper. No deal!").
So the whole thing was totally ridiculous. In character, none of the Earl folks did very well. Some examples:
Category: We asked a hundred people to name a famous Jessica...
Tim Stack: Jessica Tandy
Roker: I woulda gone with Jessica Rabbit.
Stack: No... Jessica Tandy. She was hot in 1929.
Roker: You sure?
Stack: If you'd seen Tandy in '29...
Category: Something women wear that's uncomfortable...
Joy: (while wearing giant lucite heels) Nipple... (BUZZZZZZZ)
Roker: I don't even want to know...
Category: Something that gets louder as it gets older...
Earl: My mustache.
Roker: Your mustache?
Earl: We talk to each other.
The crazy thing is that the Camdenites -- the random character actors who appear once in a while on the show -- actually beat the Hickeys (the actual stars who NBC probably wanted to see playing in the next round), so they went to the finals against the actors from the Office. It was surreal. A bunch of random bit role playing actors competing on a television game show in character against the cast of a television show (that blurs the lines of reality enough that some the actors use their real names for their characters, and the charity they played for was located in Scranton) who were surprisingly not in character, with Al Roker trying to make sense of the whole thing.
Of course, the cast of the Office won out on Oscar's sudden-death victory, and then Oscar and Brian won 50 grand for some dinky charity in Scranton, PA that will probably now have to hang their names of the wall for being their biggest donors of all time.
(I'd like to briefly interrupt this blog post to point out the following: If you go to IMDB.com, and you click to view a trailer for an upcoming movie, they make you watch an ad before they'll show you the trailer. Isn't a trailer already an ad? Did I just watch an ad so that I could watch another ad?)
After Family Feud, I watched a new episode of Alton Brown's Good Eats. Frequent readers of this space probably know that, culinarily speaking, I pretty much worship the ground he walks on. I've watched many Good Eats episodes (the ones on leeks, beets, and onion soup, to name a few) about a hundred times. When Sara and I were registering for kitchen-related wedding gifts, I had to consult AB's book every time Sara suggested registering for some gadget or other.
So this new episode of Good Eats was about canned tuna. And I hated it. AB didn't make a single thing that I would want to eat. And he poo-pooed plain-old canned tuna (which I happen to love) in favor of the pouched stuff or this fancy canned tuna crap from Spain. Blekh. This, of course, was a first. I don't think I've ever seen the guy cook something in which I was totally uninterested, and in this one episode he did it several times.
When I was done suffering through Alton Brown talking to a guy in a tuna costume, I headed over to live TV to catch a few minutes of Conan.
I don't watch so much late-nite TV these days, mostly because the little TV watching time I have is usually right around when Leno/Letterman and Conan are on, and I almost always dedicate that time to whatever's on the DVR. So it's been awhile since I've been exposed to Conan's unique brand of absurdist humor. And I was pleasantly surprised by how good he was.
First of all, there was a bit where he talked about Kirstie Alley wishing she had Twix bars for fingers... so she could eat them. Then he had Selma Blair, on. He kind of had to hold her hand through the whole interview, because she's dreadfully not funny. She tried really hard to get a laugh from the audience, even going so far as to talk about the color of her nipples, and then the color of Conan's nipples. The audience took it as the cheap attempt that it was. But Conan was brilliant, and he had me laughing out loud several times in 20 minutes or so.
So maybe I should be watching more TV.
