Site Presented By
Tuesday, Nov 24, 2009
Amateur Whitney Houston covers! "Baywatch" babes turned low-rent spokesmodels! Obscene crank calls! If you found the prime-time season too taxing, summer TV is for you.
Jun 27, 2002 | Summer is here. The days have gotten longer (and are ready to start getting shorter again). TV gets especially saturnalian. Which, you know, is nice. It used to be that summer programming was just a graveyard for network prime-time reruns, and what good was that? With big-time producers on hiatus, or recovering from the blow of not having their series picked up in the fall, what were the season breaks but a cruel reminder that some people get to take the summer off?
Whatever the reasons this valuable patch of broadcast remained fallow, it's now a virtual petri dish in full sprout. Granted, most of the summer shows are either morally or aesthetically objectionable and often both, but screeds seem hopelessly behind the times in our post-post-ironic age. Instead of complaining, why not sit back and feel grateful that you can finally take a break from it all? Following the dramatizations of current events on "The West Wing" and "Law & Order" week after week can be so taxing. Bad TV, on the other hand, gives and gives and asks so little in return. And who knows? Once you've seen some of the new fall shows, you might look back on summer as a glorious, golden age.
"American Idol: The Search for a Superstar," Tuesdays 9 p.m., FOX
An old-fashioned talent show with the new-fashioned feature of value-added public humiliation, "American Idol" is a "Gong Show" the Marquis de Sade would love. This is not to suggest that "American Idol" is a rip-off of "The Gong Show." It's a rip-off of the U.K. hit "Pop Idol." And it's got the nasty Brit to prove it.
"American Idol" is a talent competition in which contestants compete by singing, and choosing their wardrobes wisely. A triumvirate of judges -- aforementioned nasty U.K. record executive Simon Cowell, singer Paula Abdul and music producer Randy Jackson -- provide insta-critiques of each of the contestants' performances as well as a few reality checks here and there. Their observations are not as uniformly tart as you might hope -- Randy is measured, Paula is gentle (though there's something in her smile that says, "That's right, honey. Be a big star. See where it got me") -- but Simon is a real shredder. As the judges narrow the contestants down to 30 finalists, viewers call in to decide who gets to move to the next round, and the winner obtains a record contract and a management deal. All we have to worry about is having him or her pop up in a Pepsi commercial a few years down the line. It's all so very vicious.
Sadly, tone-deaf contestants who dared to deviate from regulation beauty standards were weeded out weeks ago, and the weeping has subsided somewhat since the early days. (The contestants that remain suffer from dangerously high self-esteem, and given how prefabricated their dreams are, it would be gratifying to see more tears.) As a result, the "show" part of the show has become a thing that must be endured, as one aspirant after another snaps on two inches of glittery spandex and belts out a Whitney Houston number. But when Simon opens his mouth, you remember why you cared in the first place. In fact, "American Idol" kind of makes you wish that the road to stardom really were this public and this final. After all, why shouldn't we elect our own singing stars? It's not as if we elect our own president.
"Sorority Life," Mondays 10:30 p.m., MTV
A sorority at the University of California at Davis agrees to invite in an MTV camera crew for a peek at what goes on behind the scenes. Finally, questions will be answered like: Why did I get cut from that one sorority during rush that one time simply for having to use the bathroom? Here's why: Because sorority rush is a carefully orchestrated minuet in which the tiniest change of plans can wreak utter havoc. As I discovered too late, I had not only blown my allotted three minutes with one "Debbie" by trotting off to the facilities, I had also thrown the whole meet-and-greet circuit out of whack.
