Tuesday, August 29, 2006

Fall Series Debuts - Tuesday August 29, 2006

Coming tonight to a television near you courtesy of Fox:

Celebrity Duets
Take eight celebrities not known for their singing ability. Team them up with eight professional singers. Have them sing competitively. Get Wayne Brady to host and David Foster (music legend and failed reality TV subject) to be one of the judges. Sounds like Dancing With The Stars crossed with American Idol right, although presumably without the sex scandal of Skating with Celebrities (where Lloyd Eisler dumped his pregnant wife to go make a baby with his celebrity partner Kristy Swanson). I mean we like to watch celebrities doing stuff they don't normally do and making fools of themselves in the process - hence the popularity of Dancing With The Stars and Celebrity Poker Showdown. Here's the interesting thing though. While I'm not sure about everyone in this cast I know that most of the people appearing on this series can actually sing. The celebrity cast are wrestler Chris Jericho, actresses Lucy Lawless and Lea Thompson, actors Alfonso Ribiero, Cheech Marin and Hal Sparks, Queer Eye For The Straight Guy "culture vulture" Jai Rodriguez, and Olympic gymnast Carly Patterson. Jericho is part of the satirical heavy metal band Fozzy, while Lawless, Ribiero and Rodriguez have all appeared on Broadway (and Lawless rather infamously sang the US National Anthem at an Anaheim Mighty Ducks game, during which she suffered a quite legitimate "wardrobe malfunction" that fully exposed one of her breasts). So has Lea Thompson, although she was originally a ballerina who trained with the American Ballet Theater. Hal Sparks appears with a metal band called Zero 1. Patterson has a demo contract with Joe Simpson, father of Ashley and Jessica Simpson. About the only person in the cast whose musical talent I'm not entirely sure of is Cheech Marin's. This could be an interesting show, although I suspect it won't have the drawing power of Dancing With The Stars.

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