The Sound Of The Season

Both ABC and NBC debuted new shows on Monday night. Both will have a limited run this week, but while one has the potential to become a regular series, this time around I'm going to be reviewing the one that has the potential – if people are watching – to become a holiday standard. That show is Clash Of The Choirs on NBC.

For me, choral music has always been associated with Christmas and I'm willing to bet that most people in North America or Europe – regardless of religious faith – are the same way because this is the time of year when music performed by choirs comes close to being ubiquitous. I also know a little about choral competitions. As a student in public school in Saskatoon in the 1960s singing in the school choir or with your class was almost mandatory as was participation in the city-wide choir competition. It wasn't necessarily something I looked forward to – the adjudicators seemed to take great pleasure in pointing out the faults in the singing of seven, eight, nine and ten year old kids. They usually pointed out something which standing up there you knew you didn't do. Indeed the last time I participated in one of those competitions was in 1966. The next year my class opted out of the competition because the previous year's adjudicators claimed we had sung "deserted are our hollowed sheep" when collectively we knew we had sung the correct words, "deserted are our huddled sheep." The last time I sang in public as part of a choir was in 1968 at the Saskatoon Press Club (a long and boring story, but at the same time a treasured memory for me) and while these days I can barely carry a tune in a bucket let alone stay in key and on pitch, I still appreciate the hard work that goes into singing as part of a choir. That's part of why I was looking forward to Clash Of The Choirs.

While Clash Of The Choirs is produced by NBC and BBC Worldwide America, the actual concept for the show comes from Scandinavian production company Friday TV. There the show is called Singalong but while the details may differ, the premise is the same in both versions. A celebrity goes back to their hometown to put together a choir of twenty members which then goes through a training process. After the training, the choirs go head to head in a live competition (which explains why I don't have an image for this show) over a period of three nights, with the winner being announced on the fourth night. And while the Scandinavian version of the series rewards the winning choir with all expense paid trips, the American version is for charity. The winning choir will earn $250,000 for a local charity chosen by the celebrity choir director.

The celebrities selected by NBC ran a gamut of age, experience and musical styles, not to mention parts of the country. Nick Lachey, formerly of the "boy band" 98 Degrees, (not to mention being married to Jessica Simpson) formed a choir in Cincinatti. Kelly Rowland of Destiny's Child represented Houston Texas, Michael Bolton picked his choir in New Haven Connecticut, country singer Blake Shelton selected in Oklahoma City, and Patti Labelle looked to find a choir in Philadelphia. In the show's first episode, which ran for two hours, we were "treated" to the audition process that each singer went through (and in some cases had to endure). Fortunately coverage of the audition process was kept relatively brief so that it was not entirely like American Idol auditions where we are inundated with footage of bad singers. Oh there were bad singers in the process, as well as people who thought that singing in a choir was optional and they could get by with dance moves. There were also people who insisted on songs that the celebrities had made famous, a process that didn't necessarily endear them to their prospective leaders – Patti Labelle very quickly came to hate bad renditions of Lady Marmalade even telling people who said they were going to sing it, "Please don't." There were human interest stories in each of the locations, whether it was a girl who gave Nick his first kiss in high school (and who incidentally has a tremendous voice), the two soldiers who auditioned for Blake in Oklahoma City (the both made it and sang in uniform on the show), or the 77 year-old lady who impressed Michael Bolton.

Once the behind the scenes footage was shown the choirs performed. In this first round most of the songs seemed to be pop songs of various types, although Patti Labelle's group did The Whole World In Your Hands. Nick Lachey's choir did Natasha Bedingfield's Unwritten and performed it primarily as a choral number with limited use of soloists. Kelly Rowland's group from Houston sang George Michael's Freedom in a performance that was sharp even though I found some fault with the soloists. They brought it together at the end though. The third group to perform was Michael Bolton's and it didn't live up to my expectations either from Bolton or from choirs in general. The whole thing felt like a showcase for the single soloist with nineteen back-up singers. It was one of the two worst performances of the night. The other weak performance followed with the Oklahoma City Choir fronted by Blake Shelton. It should be noted that Shelton readily admitted that he knew absolutely nothing about choirs – he had never even been in one – and it showed though the audition process and the actual performance. They did my fellow Canadian Tom Cochrane's Life Is A Highway, and while it's a song that could probably work with a choir, I don't really think it did much for this particular group. The final performance was from Patti Labelle's group and it was an amazing experience. The choir came together beautifully, as a choir with the soloists feeding into the choir rather than being out front and expecting the choir to support them. It reminded me of some of the great gospel performances I've heard over the years.

The mechanical parts of the show on the other hand may need a bit of work. Hosted by Maria Menounos of the Today Show and Access Hollywood, the show decided not to go with a judges' panel of any sort. Instead the celebrities whose choirs weren't singing were asked to comment on the performances. Naturally there was absolutely no criticism, constructive or otherwise, about the performance just comments about how great the choirs were and how wonderful the celebrity leader had done. I'm not sure that this was particularly helpful. Certainly for the viewers, who vote after each night's performance on which choir was best, this mutual self-congratulation was less than helpful since it didn't give them much idea of what was right and what was wrong with the performances. And while there were a couple of standout performances (my personal favourites were the Cincinnati and Philadelphia choirs and my least favourite was Bolton's New Haven group) not having any real critiques may make the voting procedure less about the quality of the singing and more about the popularity of the celebrity leaders. Maybe I'm flashing back to those elementary school choir competitions, but I would have liked to have seen at least some critical comments made. You don't necessarily need Simon Cowell style snarky comments for this show, but I'm convinced you need someone who can point out strengths and weaknesses. I'm also not sure about Maria Menounos as host. I found her voice a bit irritating. I've seen some criticism of her attitude; there were times when she interrupted people or cut them off. I'm not going to criticise her on that for the simple reason that the show was live to air and she had to keep it with a strict two hour time limit.

In honesty, I don't believe that I can say that Clash Of The Choirs is a show that has ongoing series appeal like that other BBC Worldwide series Dancing With The Stars. I do feel however that it is a show that fits with this time of the year. While I'm not entirely convinced that American audiences will embrace the concept (I fear that the ratings will stink although under the circumstances NBC isn't going to dump it), it is a welcome respite from reruns of whatever NBC has to rerun (the cupboard seems pretty bare over there even without the strike making a mess of things), and decades old Christmas specials. And while I probably would have preferred to see the show wind up its run closer to Christmas Eve than it will, or add an extra choir to run for a full week (the final episode airs Thursday night) I don't think that's something that should stand in the show's way. The show isn't perfect, but for a one week event at a time of the year when choral music asserts itself in our consciousness I think it works. I just hope that NBC is wise enough to recognise that this probably won't work as a sweeps event. If they are, and if they keep it as a bit of a Christmas treat, they may just have something that will become a holiday tradition in a lot of houses.

Thoughts On A Bad Change

Tomorrow they announce the nominees for the Emmys, and I find myself a bit a loose ends, particularly since I busted out of a poker tournament I was playing in well before the money (okay, so I lasted much longer than Tim Gueguen, but it's small consolation – sorry about that one Tim but let's face it, neither one of us is likely to duplicate the achievement of Tuan Lam any time in the foreseeable) and there isn't much I really want to watch on TV at the moment. So I've been sitting around the computer, and blessing anyone responsible for the invention of air conditioning. It's not the heat, it's the humidity but the humidity here lately has been brutal.

Which is how, in an extremely roundabout manner, I found the subject for this piece. I was reading the comments on the Blog when I came across this one from Marissa Leone. She was commenting on my original post on this season of America's Got Talent which featured saxophone player Andrew Beal. Andrew was sent through to the Las Vegas call back session and then was never seen again. Marissa wrote: "What happened to him? Why the heck is he not in the top 20? I'm also unsure why they originally kicked Buttercup off and now she's magically back on the show. What's going on? I'm lost." Well Marissa, you're not the only one. I don't get why Andrew was deemed not good enough while Boy Shakira is in the top 20. I mean Boy Shakira?!

Okay, here's at least part of what happened. Seventy acts were sent through to Las Vegas from the original audition cycle. That included Andrew Beal, Buttercup and the rest. In Las Vegas all of the acts performed and the judges decided which thirty-five would be eligible for the final twenty. After they named the final thirty-five they then weeded that number down to the final twenty, this time with the requirement that ten of the acts would be singers and ten would be "non-singers." We didn't see the performances of each of the seventy acts who made it to Las Vegas – in fact we only really saw about seventeen acts performing in the two Las Vegas call back episodes and we didn't necessarily see the ones who made it to the semi-finals either. In fact there was one act – Robert Hatcher, the sewer worker from Cincinnati – who we have only seen in his semi-final appearance. Somewhere in the call back audition process, Andrew "Mr. Big 'Who's the Guy'" Beal was dropped while Boy Shakira (?!) and Bollywood inspired dancer Kashif Memon (likewise ?!) did.

Like a lot of people I'm amazed at some of these selections. The restriction on the number of singers hurt acts like Michael Strelo-Smith and The Three Redneck Tenors (okay these are acts that I really liked), but some of the selections in the non-singing category were absolutely bizarre. Just as an example they decided to allow magician Kevin James to go through which was a good choice even though his performance in the semi-finals was, to say the least, extremely disappointing, but they seem to have decided that they could only have one magic act which meant that Anthony Reed was passed over despite doing a technically difficult water escape trick known as the Aquarian Illusion, claiming that the trick was nothing new. And there were other non-musical acts that were eliminated for reasons that we'll never know because they weren't shown on the program, while Kashif Memon, whose act is sort of like dance karaoke (the only real description I can come up with) and Boy Shaikira (who is now officially supported by Vote For The Worst).

I put most of the blame for this on the new format that the show has adopted. In the first season approximately sixty acts made it through to the second round. They were split into four groups and the judges picked ten acts from each group to perform each week. The judges picked one act each week to go through to the finals and viewer phone votes picked a second act to go through. In the fifth week a "Wild Card" show was run, in which the four runners up in the viewer vote from each previous week, together with two choices by each judge from pool of acts that hadn't made it into their top ten each week, Again, two acts were chosen from this group, one by the judges and one by the viewers, making for a total of ten contestants in the finals.

There seem to be a couple of reasons for this change in format, which in some ways is much more like the American Idol format. A big problem in the first season was the preponderance of singers – five of the finalists were singers, and only two were non-musical acts – something that irritated Piers Morgan who wanted "a more diverse group of acts for the final." Another factor was a problem caused by NBC. Originally the series was meant to air beginning in January in the Sunday night slot eventually occupied by Grease: You're The One That I Want but at some point it was moved back to a weeknight timeslot in the summer. I am given to understand that some if not all of the original auditions were done for the original launch date. Part of the time change was the elimination of the results show. I have a suspicion – though of course I can't prove it – that the Las Vegas call backs may have been meant to at least partly to bridge the gap between the auditions in the third quarter of 2006 and the summer show. Because I would hate to think that producer Simon Cowell thought that what we have now is the best format for the show.

My personal feeling is that so many of the problems that people have been complaining about in this season of America's Got Talent would have been avoided if the show had stuck with its original format. Think of it. It wouldn't have been that hard to set up. Keep the seventy acts, and if the producers still want to maintain the equal split between singing and non-singing acts then have two weeks of singers and two weeks of non-singers. With six acts chosen by the judges from those who qualified but weren't picked in the four semifinal shows as Wild Cards (joined by the four acts that finished second in the viewer votes in the first four semi-final episodes) you would have forty-six of seventy acts (65%) that the judges initially decided were good enough to go forward being seen by the American public. And while Boy Shakira or Kashif Memon might just possibly have made it into one of the two episodes that didn't feature singers, I can't imagine that any of the judges would have wasted a "wild card" pick on them any more than I believe that the American public would vote them into the finals or even give them the second highest number of votes. And I think it would have made for far more entertaining television than the two Vegas call back episodes, where we saw most acts only as part of montages or as they were being eliminated or told that they were moving on.

So anyway Marissa, and everyone else, that's why you didn't see Andrew "Mr. Big 'Who's the Guy'" Beal on America's Got Talent after the episode where he totally blew us away. It's a shame too, because he and most of the other forty or so acts that didn't make it out of Las Vegas and who weren't seen performing on the one "Call Back episode" that actually showed performances deserved to be treated better than they were by the show's producers. I don't know if Andrew Beal or any of the other acts that we didn't see had more to their acts than what we saw in their auditions – maybe some of them were this season's David & Dania who did the same act the same way each of the three times they were on the show – but that's not the point. The point is that we the audience should at least have had a chance to decide that for ourselves instead of having Hasselhoff, Morgan and Osbourne deciding that these are the ten singers and the ten "variety" acts that are worthy of our consideration. The sad and truly annoying part is that the show, with this less than satisfactory format (from my point of view at least), is doing well in the ratings and I assume that if/when this show returns next year it will come back with this format because it's not "less successful" than the way the show was done originally, which in my view is a pity because I think that as viewers we're being cheated.

A Vaguely Disappointing Talent

There was something vaguely off about the season debut of America's Got Talent on Tuesday night, but I'm at a loss to explain why I feel that way. Maybe it was a combination of things, but put them all together and the result was not as much fun as the debut of the show's first season.

Now don't get me wrong the show was still quite enjoyable but it didn't sparkle the way that it did in the first season. Then, I was a jaded viewer fully expecting another dull American Idol clone courtesy of Simon Cowell, with the complete formula – a snarky Brit, a ditzy judge, and an industry pro, auditions in which you truly awful performers to ridicule as well as ones with ability – in which the big difference was that the ditz was David Hasselhoff and the host wasn't a Ryan Seacrest clone but Regis Philbin. I was expecting to hate it but somewhere in the first episode that I saw (I missed the LA auditions because I basically wasn't interested), and I don't honestly know if it was the guy who balanced a motorcycle on his face, the "Snow White stripper" (Michelle L'amour) that the PTC loathed, or Leonid The Magnificent in his wings, but they had me hooked.

There were some important cast changes between the first and second season. Brandy – the industry pro in my view, famous for giving all three "X"es to Michelle L'amour and having to fight Hasselhoff and Morgan to do it – withdrew as a judge largely due to her legal problems related to the charge of involuntary vehicular manslaughter (and the $50 million wrongful death suit filed against her). She has been replaced with Sharon Osbourne who really is an industry pro. I can't imagine her fighting to "X" a "Snow White stripper; on the other hand I can't imagine Hasselhoff and Morgan giving her as much trouble as they did Brandy if she did want to do it. The other big replacement was that Regis left the show and was replaced by Jerry Springer. Springer is clearly continuing the effort to rehabilitate his image that began with Dancing With The Stars. The problem is that Jerry doesn't have the sort of frenetic energy that Regis brings to just about anything. Everything seems to be ratcheted down just a bit.

I didn't feel the same way on Tuesday night. Last year I wrote "There were great acts, awful acts, and then there are the truly bizarre." This year, with the first auditions taking place in Dallas, there didn't seem to be as much of the "totally bizarre" as there was last year. Oh there were some odd acts but there also seemed to be an emphasis on the bad acts. One of the worst was an overweight Elvis impersonator (who looked fatter than "fat" Elvis) who was simultaneously "X"ed before he even opened his mouth to introduce himself. Even Piers Morgan (the snarky British judge) realised that this was unfair so they took back their "X"es and let him sing...two words. There were a host of bad Bianca Ryan imitators (she won the first season of America's Got Talent) including one who was shown and was singing the same song that Bianca sang "I'm Telling You I'm Not Going" (which was also sung by former American Idol contestant and Best Supporting Actress Oscar winner Jennifer Hudson in Dreamgirls). This kid was no Bianca. Another kid thought he was a ventriloquist. Piers asked him if he practiced a lot. The kid said he really didn't need to – he was so wrong.

There was controversy when another act came out. She was a nine year-old doing what was described as a "full cheerleading routine", and to be honest she and/or it weren't that good. More to the point we kept getting shots of Jerry and the girl's mom and by her head movements the woman was going through the entire routine with her daughter. Piers was harsh in his critique and openly suggested that she was only there because her mother was a stage mother. Meanwhile Sharon was steaming. Then Jerry brought the mother out and Piers started cross-examining her. At which point Sharon got up from the judges table, said she'd had enough and walked back to her dressing room vowing that she was quitting. You could tell she was serious too, because she pulled off her artificial eyelashes as she was walking. Piers walked almost immediately thereafter, either because he thought they were taking a break or to apologize to Sharon or what. Meanwhile the kid, her mother, and Jerry were left staring at Hasselhoff, who was probably wishing he had a bottle of booze and a cheeseburger right at that moment. Eventually Piers apologized to Sharon and the two of them were informed that the kid (and her mother and Jerry) were still on stage. They came back and Piers apologized but they all told her no.

There were a few bizarre acts. There was an aerialist who used long fabric sheets rather than ropes. He was actually quite good no matter what the judges felt. There was also acts like a guy who works in four large tubes put together like a four legged spider whose act involved extending and retracting various tubes. The judges liked it but basically thought it was an act for kids. Then there was the guy who sounded a lot like Barry White. Sang like him too when he did "Don't You Wish Your Boyfriend Was Hot Like Me?" Unfortunately he opted to do it topless except for a collar tie and hat and believe me when I say that this is one time when I wish the FCC had rules on exposing male nipples. And speaking of male nipples some mention has to be made of the two brothers who flexed their pecs to "Duelling Banjos" – some, but not much.

There were more than a few good acts. There was a singer named Fallon who accompanied herself on the guitar. Her guitar playing wasn't great but her voice more than made up for it. There were three girls reminiscent of The Supremes, and Jabberwockee, a group of break dancers who performed wearing expressionless white face masks. The Duttons, a multi-generational family group from Branson Missouri started with six adults and suddenly ballooned when half a dozen kids came out. Piers gave them an "X" because of the kids – his feeling was that despite playing instruments the kids added nothing to the act. I'm inclined to agree; several of the kids seemed only to be going through the motions of playing their instruments.

For a long time I was divided on what my favourite acts were. Fallon was on the list, but so was a young woman ventriloquist who, with her two puppets, sang "Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious" (and believe it or not Word did not mark that as spelled wrong!). Piers thought it was an act for kids but this young woman was dead on in how she sang the parts in terms of getting the voices right and the rotation. An act that I loved and felt sorry for was Mr. Bill, a Las Vegas school bus driver with an amazing tenor or baritone voice. He sang "Climb Every Mountain" from The Sound Of Music and almost from the beginning the crowd was booing him for reasons passing all of my understanding. Piers hit his "X" but then, Mr. Bill amazed him by stepping up the quality of his performance. The booing grew less intense and some people actually started cheering in response to the boos. After Mr. Bill finished his performance, Piers apologized for hitting his button so soon. None of the judges voted for him to continue though, and I'm convinced that Mr. Bill was betrayed by his material. If he had sung an operatic aria, for example "Nessun Dorma" from Turandot, I'm convinced that people would have taken notice of him.

The final act of the night became my favourite and may be enough to convince me that this show is still almost as good as it was last year. He was Andrew Beal aka Mr. Big "Who's the Guy" Beal. Coming out he looked like a nerdy guy with a sax, and people were giving an "oh good grief" look. But then he started to play and to dance around, combining hip-hop popping moves with incredible sax playing which completely won the audience and the judges over. It was an amazing performance and has to be seen as one of the frontrunners when the series shifts to the semi-final rounds in Las Vegas.

Even though I thought, based on the first episode, that America's Got Talent had slipped a bit I still consider it to be a terrific show in the great tradition of Vaudeville and Major Bowes Original Amateur Hour. And it's not just an American phenomenon any more. According to Wikipedia – and the show's own introductory sequence – there are versions of the show in at least nine different countries including Australia, Britain, and Greece. This is yet another show, like Dancing With The Stars, that a Canadian television could do very well with if they were willing to spend the money to license the concept and run with it. CTV has done phenomenally well with Canadian Idol but as yet no one take a chance with these other shows.

Finally, here's a YouTube clip of Andrew Beal.

Okay Kids, It’s Over

I found this Blondie cartoon a few weeks ago and I've been saving it. Alexander and Cookie are obviously reacting to their parents cutting a rug in the same way that kids react when they discover Mom and Dad necking and realize that they are still probably still having sex. Of course in the case of Blondie and Dagwood, the strip was created back when the Foxtrot was the latest dance and the Tango had been popular since Valentino did it in Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse a few years before.

Fear not Cookie and Alexander, your parents will now stop behaving in this disgustingly unparental manner – the latest season of Dancing With The Stars has ended with the triumph of Apolo Anton Ohno and his professional partner Julianne Hough over Joey Fatone & Kym Johnson, and Laila Ali & Maksim Chmerkovskiy – announced at the end of a two hour finale that followed and hour long wind-up of The Bachelor.

So did the right people win? Not according to my mother! She was cheering for Laila Ali throughout the whole competition but then again she liked Billy Ray Cyrus (not as a dancer mind you but as a personality – I thought that Heather Mills and even John Ratzenberger were better than him). I liked Laila too but there were a couple of moments when the wheel came completely off. Number one was a couple of weeks ago when her dad was in the audience of the live show. Laila's strength was always a sort of sexy elegance epitomized by her performance in the Latin dances, but Muhammed Ali didn't like to see his daughter doing those sexy moves, so her performance was far more demure than in other weeks and the judges called her on it. The other time was when it counted, on semi-final Monday. Her freestyle performance totally lacked the elegance that the judges wanted to see from her and again they called her on it.

Both Joey and Apolo had stumbles in their semi-final performances, both during their "Judges Choice" dances. The choreography on both dances veered radically from the stylistic norms of the dance that the people were told to do. Their marks were reduced significantly. They made up for it on the Freestyle performances though. Apolo & Julianne put together a hip hop number that fitted their youth and which earned 10s from all three judges. Then if anything Joey & Kym out performed them with a dance that started with Joey leaping off the stage over Kym's head and landing on the stage and culminated with a sequence of lifts and spins that had judge Len Goodman saying that it was a shame that they could only give out 10s. It was showy and entertaining which was Joey's greatest strength.

The two hour finale on Tuesday night was more than a little anticlimactic when it came to judging. Each team was allowed to repeat one dance they had done from the previous episodes. Julianne & Apolo opted to perform their Pasa Doble a second time. It was one of two dances that the team had received a perfect score of 30 on – the other was a Samba in week 5 – and Apolo felt that it was his best dance. He earned a 30 on it the second time as well. On the other hand Joey & Kim decided to do the Tango they had done in the first week to the music from Star Wars. The movie is a favourite of Joey's and it was a dance they had done early in the season when he was unused to dancing. They earned a perfect 30 this time around with the biggest improvements being to his posture. Laila & Maks did a Mambo they had originally done in the second week of competition and they too earned a perfect score of 30. In other words the positions set on the first night hadn't changed in the second. The judges' votes, when combined with the votes of the viewers at home, which were cast after seeing only two of the dances, placed Laila Ali in third spot with Joey finishing in second

The two hour finale could have easily have been packaged as a 90 minute show without losing much of significance. There was a review of the history of the American Dancing With The Stars which acknowledged – albeit briefly – the show's origins as the British series Strictly Come Dancing but which implied that the series' international expansion was based almost entirely on the success of the American show when this was at the very least suspect if not mostly false. Previous results shows this season had been notable for the presence of several major musical acts and guest dancers. The series finale had the dancers eliminated in previous episodes doing samples of their dances, and given the length of time some of them had been off the show doing them even worse than they had when they were practicing every week. In short, even though there was considerable excitement as a result of the final results viewed objectively, the finale dragged more than a little. But of course in terms of ratings, that's isn't going to matter: the two episodes of the Dancing With The Stars finale are going to draw huge ratings, probably at least as good if not better than the ratings for the finale of Lost although probably not quite as good as the ratings for the finale of American Idol. It is ABC's big ratings winner of the year.

All of which leads to a final question from me. Dancing With The Stars appears in 32 different countries in addition to Britain (where it originated) and the United States. Greece, Lebanon, Thailand, Brazil, and Hong Kong are reported to be getting ready to do their own shows. One of the 32 countries is not Canada (or at least not English Canada – there's a show in Quebec called Le Match des etoiles which is similar to Dancing With The Stars in a number of ways but not a copy) and I guess my question is why CTV, which has adopted the Pop Idol/American Idol model with Canadian Idol – and done so quite successfully in terms of ratings and discovering talent – has not come up with a Canadian version of Dancing With The Stars? The show gives the network huge ratings (although apparently not huge enough for them to broadcast the finale live or in prime time – it aired here on Wednesday morning between 10 a.m. and Noon) and in the past we've seen Canadian specials for Who Wants To Be A Millionaire and Deal Or No Deal (on Global) so why not Dancing With The Stars – Canada?

Why I'll Be Watching The Dancing With The Stars Finale

Forget Emmitt Smith (right) and Mario Lopez (left), I'm watching this show because of their partners, Cheryl Burke and Karina Smirnoff. It's sort of like "Chick Flicks". Guys who "know" realise that you get the best nudity in "Chick Flicks." Guy films have nudity all right but it's usually one of the action heroes who's exposing his bits, as opposed to - you know - a woman. Well in Dancing With The Stars you have lithe athletic young women without a trace of excess body fat that I can detect, dressed in frequently revealing costumes shaking what their Mamas made them. And best of all, the Parents Television Council thinks it's all good clean fun. I'm glad they can't read my mind!

The Fatal Flaw

America's Got Talent has a fatal flaw (yeah, hard to believe I know) and it was revealed by resident Brit, Piers Morgan, at the end of Wednesday's second semifinal episode. The three judges - Morgan, Brandy, and David Hasselhoff - have to pick one of the ten acts that appeared to go through to the finals, while the public gets to decide on the other act. The judges couldn't agree and at one point an exasperated Piers half shouts half moans in a way reminiscent of Gordon Ramsay contemplating the latest disaster in Hell's Kitchen (but without the"colourful" language) "This is a talent competition. You can't just have singers!" Singers Brandy and Hasselhoff (he is or was big in Germany although I think it was only West Germany) look at him as if he's crazed. The trouble is that Piers is right - and they're right. Because if this show didn't attract good quality singers who were underage or otherwise ignored by American Idol and the other shows, they wouldn't have much and certainly no act that they could build a live show around.

Take that episode as an example. Of the ten acts selected from a pool of 15 that had been brought to LA. three were singing groups, there was one classical pianist and six novelty acts. The clear class of the night was At Last an a capella singing quartet, while I was less impressed with N'Versity a trio of high school girls who reportedly sang a soul number - I was waiting for it to develop more of a beat. And all I can say about Sugar and Spice is that I'm surprised that they made it past the first round. The older girls were only average singers and the younger ones seemed to serve no purpose except as stage decorations, because they certainly couldn't dance. The classical pianist was an 8 year-old girl named Natasha Le who played Bach's Tocatta & Fugue in D Minor, a piece that I'm more used to hearing on an organ. And while the judges were really enthusiastic about her playing I noted a few wrong notes, or at least what sounded like wrong notes.

The novelty acts ranged from the brilliant to the incredibly stupid, but whose fault was it for letting them through the audition process. Some were great. Realis, a pair who performed a sort of acrobatic dance routine were strong enough to be the judges' eventual choice to go to the finals. "Bobby Badfingers" whose act consists of snapping his fingers to music was better than any description of his act, and hand balancing acrobat Vladimir did work which the judges didn't fully appreciate. Even "Leonid The Magnificent" (working this time without his wings, but appearing at the start in an indescribable pink outfit that looked like it could have come from a Marlene Dietrich movie) had a tremendous act that involved spinning and balancing a cube shaped metal frame. One of the judges described him as a Christmas tree in January, but while this act may have looked simple, I have an old high school friend who has been a professional juggler for over 25 years and he would probably say that working with that cube was quite difficult. Certainly Leonid was better than a number of the novelty acts, like Dave the Horn Guy who played The Star Spangled Banner on the variety of horns attached to his orange jump suit. The judges said that his act was corny but they were the ones who brought him into the semifinals. And then there was Mark "The Knife" Faje who made it into the semifinals by kicking a burning bowling ball with two steak knives sticking out of it onto his head while having a live scorpion in his pants. They loved that but when he came back for the semifinals he did the act that got him banned in England Scotland and Ireland; balancing a running electric lawn mower on his chin (the handle was on his chin) and having two assistants throw heads of lettuce.To say the least it was bizarre, and not in a good way.

The fundamental problem that America's Got Talent has is that if you were putting together a show featuring a single act - as the initial publicity seemed to indicate that the intention of the show was to put the winning act in a Las Vegas casino show - then the only suitable acts are the singers, dancers, and maybe the instrumentalists. Certainly the fans, who voted in young yodeller Taylor Ware last week and a capella singers At Last this week seemed to recognise it. If, on the other hand you were to put together a revue type show - like an old time vaudeville show - which featured a number of different types of act then the novelty acts, including someone like Leonid, would fit right in. The problem is that the show is about rewarding just one act and in that the novelty acts, which are what the show is building much of its fanbase on (it's been renewed for a second season on the basis of the highest ratings of any summer show), will inevitably lose out. About the only thing that novelty acts like Realis or Leonid The Magnificent can realistically expect from this experience is exposure that might possibly get them work

Talent Is In The Eye Of The Beholder

So after I managed to post the Superman stuff - and you don't want to know the sort of grief I went through getting that up - I was sort of at loose ends. My poker playing hadn't been going that great over the past few days - still isn't given that I just busted out of a tourney on the first hand with pocket Ks; my two opponents each had one A which picked up a second A on the Turn; the percentages of that happening are something like 8% (one of the guys had a 7 which paired on the River and tripled him up - and there was no World Cup games to distract me. I was, in short, bored and frustrated and even central air and digital cable that finally works in the summer wasn't doing it for me. (By the way, on that Digital Cable thing, I just want to say that I love my cable company. When I finally called them they sent out a repair guy the next day, he diagnosed the problem immediately and installed the amplifier device that I needed immediately. Not what I was expecting given the horror stories you frequently hear about cable companies.) So I did something I hadn't really expected to do - I watched America's Got Talent.

I didn't see this show last week when it debuted. As a matter of fact wild horses couldn't have dragged me to the TV to watch another clone of American Idol. The I started hearing things. Things like how awful this show was. Things like how Simon Cowell should be ashamed of himself for foisting this on the American public. Things like how it resembled the Gong Show. Things like how it won it's time slot against So You Think You Can Dance on Fox and whatever CBS, ABC and "not yet CW" weblets were putting out on the night. That last one was what got me. People were actually watching this thing that professionals and amateurs alike were calling horrible. Either the people writing about this were wrong or the public was wrong and would rectify the situation in this week. Either way I wanted to see what the fuss was all about. And what did I see? In one word Vaudeville.

Yeah, Vaudeville, that grand mishmash of singers, acrobats, instrumentalists, jugglers, dancers, and animal acts, all on one stage performing for you edification and pleasure, with Regis Philbin as Mr. Interlocutor bringing up the acts and the judging panel of Brandy, David Hasselhof, and former London Daily Mirror editor Piers Morgan acting as the guy with the hook (or Chuck Barris's panel with the mallets) who have the power to let the act continue or end it prematurely. The result is - or can be - hilarious at least in the audition phase. I'm not sure how well it will work when they have a stable of performers who actually have some talent.

Take last night's episode. There were great acts, awful acts, and then there are the truly bizarre. Since this week's auditions took place in New York the bizarre quotient was elevated but not extreme. Last week's episode was in Los Angeles and took two hours. You figure out the bizarre quotient there. But New York was pretty bizarre. I mean how else do you describe a guy who is 6' something before he put on a pair of the sort of platform shoes that Elton John wore in his heyday, dabbed in silver glitter make-up on his skin and hair, with what could probably be described as a short kilt if you were being kind about it or a micro-miniskirt if you weren't, and completed (of course) with a pair of red and white angel's wings. This is Leonid the Magnificent, and excuse me for saying so but I think he might just possibly be Gay. His act is balancing a sword on a knife and then do things like splits and the sort of thing that Rhythmic Gymnasts do when they are working with ribbons and hoops. Leonid had a problem with his props - he dropped the sword but recovered - and was brokenhearted when David & Piers gave him an X. Piers said that Leonid would look good on his Christmas Tree but on a talent show no way. Only Brandy loved him but it was enough to later persuade the others to give him a chance to beg for a chance which he did, successfully. Then there was Frank Simon, a guy with the heavy Hungarian accent who came out with a motor scooter and an electric range. As soon as Piers saw the guy lift the motor scooter he hit the button. The Hungarian man had a sort of mouthpiece and proceeded to put one side to the scooter's kickstand on the mouthpiece and balance the thing over his head. Then he did the same thing with the range. Brandy Xed him before the range and David after. They didn't think he had talent (but the let Leonid go through). The ripped naval reservist who spent 300 days at sea perfecting a "beat box" act which basically meant making silly noises with less ability than that guy in the Police Academy movies. There was "Sideswipe" a group of three martial artists, with 20 titles between them, who sort of do kickboxing to music which sounds a lot less entertaining than it actually was. There were clog dancers who were clogging to music that was a lot more modern than most cloggers. These two acts got through and deservedly so.

And then there were my two favourite acts. Michelle L'Amour - and I'd be shocked, shocked I tell you, if that's her real name given her act - who came on stage dressed as Snow White, as in the one from Disney's first animated feature. Do you remember that routine on the Oscars years ago when Rob Lowe sang Proud Mary with a woman dressed like Snow White and the folks at Disney were - to say the least - were not amused to the point of threatening to sue? Well Michelle had better have a good lawyer. Snow White stripped all the way down to a spangly bra and a pair of "panties" which offered proof positive that she shaved down there. She stripped quite well actually, much better than those women at the clubs who are actually nude dancers who view clothes as a not always necessary obstacle to getting cash on the runway. What she would have done if Brandy hadn't managed to escape the grasp of spangle and Morgan to push both of their buttons - the ones at the desks not the ones that Michelle was pushing - and stop the act is anyone's guess.

The act of the night however had to be young Bianca Ryan. She's 11 years old and she came out to sing And I'm Telling You I'm Not Going which Brandy rather condescendingly called a big song, presumably meaning a big song for such a little girl. Let me tell you now that she may be a little girl but she has an amazingly big voice. She had the crowd and the judges (except for Piers and only because he wanted to maintain the slightest amount of objectivity) standing half-way through the song. If she were older she would be on Simon Cowell's other show and probably win the damned thing but as it is she stood out in the mass of bad singers acrobats and magicians like a perfect rose in a field of wild flowers and weeds. No wonder they saved her for the last act on the audition show.

Watching the acts on America's Got Talent I couldn't help but think of the old Ed Sullivan Show, the first and last of what writer Tim Brooks called Vaudeo but which I tend to think of a Vaudevideo (it sounds better). While most people today remember the Sullivan Show - if they remember it at all - for the rock and pop acts that debuted on the series in the 1960s. But the show that Ed Sullivan put on the stage every week was so much more. Brooks says that Sullivan offered "a three-ring circus of comedians, acrobats, opera singers, scenes from plays, and dancing bears." He was right but he seems to say it as if it were a bad thing. I, who remember the show before The Beatles appeared on it (but just barely) remember it as great fun entertainment, not despite the acrobats, and the plate spinners, and the little Italian mouse who was and is still immensely popular in Italy (and apparently in Japan oddly enough), but in a way because of them. The show had something for everybody and continued to do so until CBS told us we were really too sophisticated to enjoy this sort of thing. Sullivan would have loved Bianca, but he'd also have had a place for Frank Simon and maybe even Leonid, and certainly for the magician who worked with doves. It wasn't that much later that our "sophistication" gave birth to The Gong Show where the point wasn't to see how good these acts were but to ridicule and laugh at - rather than with - bad acts, and in a way for the judges to take centre stage rather than the contestants. People hated The Gong Show... but they watched it. In an odd sort of way America's Got Talent tries to meld The Gong Show's comedic aspects with the sheer variety of acts that Sullivan presented and maybe just a touch of Major Bowes Amateur Hour or Arthur Godfrey's Talent Scouts (two shows which I most emphatically do not remember). The sophisticated voices of professional and a lot of amateur critics don't get this show and attack it for being what it is. The evidence however is that the public is watching this show, even though there appears to be a decline in viewership from last week. For myself I found myself being entertained in a way that I'm often not by "professionals" like Freddie Prinz Jr. whose show Freddie I tried to watch - if only out of respect for his wife - and found totally unpalatable. America's Got Talent may appeal to the something lower than the lowest common denominator but in the end the premise lives up to the old song: That's Entertainment!. And really, what more should you want.

Too Much Bread, Not Enough Jam

So I admit that I have a fondness verging on addiction for Dancing With The Stars (to the point where I'd like to see a Canadian version) but like various Shakespearean heroes, the show has a fatal flaw. As the series goes on there are fewer performers and since the dances are physically taxing in terms of energy there is a brief period of time that the celebrity dancers in particular can go on before there are consequences - like falling or suffering a myocardial infarction. The net result is that the actual dancing part of the show takes less time each and every episode. Now in part they've combatted this by adding a second dance to the program for each team, but the problem continued. In last night's episode the problem came to a head in part because the programming weasels at ABC made a particularly stupid move.

The stupid move that the programming weasels made was to can Crumbs. Now as I understand it the "plan" is to put some sort of reality programming into the second hour of Thursday next week. And over the last two weeks they've shoehorned a repeat of Grey's Anatomy into the post Dancing With The Stars time by cutting Primetime back to a half hour. But they didn't have that luxury this Thursday so to fill the time slot, instead of burning off a final episode of Crumbs, they expanded Dancing With The Stars to two hours. The result? Well it wasn't pretty.

The tease at the start of the episode showed the celebrity dancers preparing for their performances for the night. Which is about all we saw of them live in that first hour. Most of the time was spent with Tom Bergeron - and to a lesser degree Samantha Harris reviewing the performances that the teams had done during the previous weeks. First we were "treated" to the best of Jerry & Anna then to Stacy & Tony and finally to Drew and Cheryl, all in considerable detail. We saw excerpts from all but one of the dances from each couple. After all they were going to be doing their favourite dance from previous weeks so it wouldn't be "helpful" for us to see how they'd done them before. We might compare them with what the teams did live and see faults and flaws - or at least differences - in the current performances. Interspersed between these taped highlights were taped highlights of the professional dancers doing routines that had been performed during previous one hours results show. The one hour results show was of course created once ABC decided that they could shelve Faith and Hope for a few weeks and no one would notice. And actually once they made up their minds that the results show would be live throughout what they had was not a bad product, with the emphasis on the potential music/variety format and the results of the dancing taking second place.

Now all of this occurred during the first excruciating hour of the final dance session. There was still an hour to go, which is the flaw in the whole procedure. The first hour was a waste of time - at least of my time since I could have used that hour to watch Survivor and not been forced to use my late feed to catch up. Beyond that it hurt the flow of the show. If the programming weasels were determined to have a two hour final dancing episode, they could have at least put the first dances for each team in the first hour, interspersed with the material on training, and staged the second Freestyle routines in the second hour. Or better yet they could have chopped the damned thing down to ninety minutes - as in previous weeks - which would have made the entire program tighter. Looking at professional routines could have been held of until the results show or just dumped all together. After all aren't we there to watch B or C class celebrities make fools of themselves by dancing?

By the way, just for the record, I think that Thursday night was the night that Stacy "not an elf" Kiebler lost the competition. Stacy & Tony's Jive was spectacular of course, but the whole house of cards collapsed with the Freestyle dance which literally looked as if it had been recycled from Saturday Night Fever and featured just one lift. It was a safe routine and consequently it was a capital "B" boring routine. The judges thought so to the point where they actually awarded higher marks to Jerry and Anna (in the most absurd Afro wigs ever) than to the "weapon of mass seduction". But the truly amazing performance came from Drew Lachey and Cheryl Burke who earned a second perfect score with their Passa Doble done to Michael Jackson's Thriller followed by a knock-out routine done to the song Save a Horse, Ride a Cowboy that featured plenty of lifts and athleticism and earned them another perfect score of 30 from the three judges. More to the point it showed just how weak and safe the routine that Stacy and Tony put together was.

If I were to handicap this thing right now, I'd say that Drew and Cheryl are the likely winners, but given the way that the voting is set up it is entirely possible for any team - including Jerry and Anna - to win. What I can predict, with unerring certainty, is that the final results show of this season will again be an oversized extravaganza. It will, on the whole, be better than the two hours on Thursday night if they remember to focus on music and dance rather than building tension for the results - that can be done in half an hour or an hour - but in my opinion it will still be a bloated production compared to what it probably should be. An hour - fine; ninety minutes - pushing it; but two hours? Too little substance trying to cover too much time, or as I said above, "too much bread, not enough jam."

You Make Me Feel Like Dancin'

Okay I admit it. I should have been watching Four Kings or The Office or My Name Is Earl for review purposes but instead I was watching the second season debut of Dancing With The Stars instead. Yes they are, at best, B-List celebrities, and some of them I've never even heard of (in the case of Kenny Mayne it doesn't help that I'm a Canadian and the only time I see ESPN is at my brother's house on Sundays), and yes I did criticize it last summer, but you know what, it is fun and It does make me feel like dancing if only because I know that I'd be better at it than P Miller. And probably Kenny Mayne.

One thing that has to be said about this season of the show is that they seem to have learned from the mistakes they made last year, the big ones and the little ones. Overall the camera work seems much better. They didn't point a camera at one of the footlights which caused the resulting glare to washed out the screen to obscure the dancers, who were after all the focus of the event. That happened a number of times in the first season, and not just in the first episode. In this first episode the only major problem occurred when one of the hand held cameras crossed in front of the field fo view of one of the studio cameras. Moreover the director seems to have gotten the message that dancing isn't something you can adequately show from the waist up. You have to see the whole body and in particular the feet. More of the shots followed Fred Astaire's rule about filming dance, that you have to see the whole body in every dance sequence.

One major problem has been eliminated with the decision to run a half hour results program on Friday rather than having teams which have already been eliminated in the previous week's voting perform again the second week. A bigger problem for me is the decision to open the phone lines for voting at the beginning of the show before any of the performances have taken place. This just seems to invite the sort of voting which happened last summer. In my mind it is probably better to open the phone lines for a specific length of time after the show has aired. Of course, since this is entertainment rather than a "real" competition - no matter what the participants may want to believe - I suppose it's acceptable. On the other hand I think the ten team formula, which led to the show expanding to two hours this week and 90 minutes next week may be more of a problem. The show didn't seem to flow as well at two hours and it did bring them into opposition with CSI. I think the show would probably do better with a smaller number of contestants - say eight - and as a result a shorter premiere episode.

Another improvement was with the hosting. Last season Tom Bergeron was initially a terrible host. He seemed to regard the whole thing as a big joke and made atrocious jokes through most of the first couple of episodes until it became clear that the show was a big hit. In this first episode he hasn't been joking nearly as much about the experience. In fact he was playing it entirely straight while maintaining a jovial manner. Last summer Bergeron's backstage co-host was former Entertainment Tonight co-host Lisa Canning. Canning isn't back this season but has been replaced by Samantha Harris of E! News. I'm not sure that the change is for the better. The backstage host's job is basically to interview celebrities which was after all Lisa Canning's job at ET and Samantha just didn't seem quite as sharp as Lisa had been.

Of course what we all want to know know is "how was the dancing." Let's just say that it ranged from spectacular to worse than Evander Holyfield ... by several orders of magnitude. Admittedly there were reasons. George Hamilton said broke four ribs falling off a yacht. Tia Carerre had a baby three months ago and is struggling with losing the weight. The best excuse of all of course goes to Master P (also listed as P Miller) who replaced his son Romeo in the competition approximately a week ago. That said he gave the single worst performance of the night. He seemed to make very little attempt to work with the music and on the whole danced the Cha Cha like a traffic cone (male celebrities did the Cha Cha - female celebrities did the Waltz). The man made Evander Holyfield from last season look like a brilliant dancer. With two exceptions the rest of the male dancers were inferior to the female celebrities. George Hamilton - he of the magnificent tan - may have been restricted in some movements by his injury (and his age - 66) which but his dancing seemed to be restricted. He was a slightly more animated traffic cone, and the difference between him and Master P - and the reason why I voted for him - was that he at least seemed to be trying. ESPN's Kenny Mayne was the second male dancer to go and he seemed to combine an inherent lack of ability with a great enthusiasm that led him to be, well silly. At one point he literally waved off a move he was supposed to do when he realize he was out of synch with his partner, Andrea Hale. At other time he made somewhat discreet waves to the audience. But again, unlike Master P he tried. The best of the male contestants were Drew Lachey and Jerry Rice. It was certainly expected that Lachey would put in an excellent performance - he was a member of the boy band 98 Degrees (along with his brother Nick of course), is currently appearing on Broadway in Rent and is married to a choreographer. He didn't disappoint as he earned the top judges marks of 24. The big surprise of the men was former 49ers wide receiver Jerry Rice. Her partner, Russian born Anna Trebunskaya seemed dubious at first. She seemed to have no real understanding of American football and in an interview stated that "real men play hockey, or soccer ... or volleyball." On the dance floor however he had a fluidity of motion as well as a strength and most importantly and enthusiasm that was exciting to see. Lachey has a leg up with his previous experience but Rice certainly has a lot of potential as this competition goes on.

The majority of the female dancers tended to be better than the men. None received a score lower than 19. That went to Soap Talk host Lisa Rinna, who made a number of slight missteps through her performance . For all that, I thought that Tia Carrere turned in a satisfactory performance. Her movements were graceful but not particularly spectacular. Spectacular came from WWE wrestler Stacy Keibler who used her previous dance training and very long legs to considerable advantage. For all that her past training might come back to haunt her if the judges expect more from her because of it. Surprises were KTLA morning news personality Giselle Fernandez whose performance was excellent in terms of fluidity, and Tatum O'Neal. Tatum was giving something of a comic performance backstage, although how much of that was the producer's idea is a good question but when it came to the dancing she was spot on.

Dancing With The Stars was an improbable ratings hit last summer. I don't expect it to draw the sort of ratings this winter that it did in the summer particularly on a Thursday night. I think that ABC made a mistake in approaching the series as anything more than cotton candy in the summer. That said I watched it, and will probably watch it again next week, because it can get addictive. Sort of like cotton candy.

Can Dance A Little

I'm not sure that it's entirely fair to review Fox's new American Idol knock off So You Think You Can Dance based on the first episode, or even the first couple of episodes, simply because the first couple of episodes are devoted to the audition process. And unlike the audition process for any of the Idol programs, these dance auditions aren't fun to watch.

The first two hour episode focussed on the audition process in New York City and Chicago (with next week's episode focussing on auditions in Los Angeles). Apparently it was a one or two day process in each city to select 50 contestants who will travel to LA and participate in the main part of the series. The audition process in each city was split into three parts. In the first part hopefuls did a few seconds of their dance routine before the producer or producers (there were three producers at the New York auditions and only one, Nigel Lithgoe, at the audition in Chicago). Following this initial process of separating the large amount of chaff from the wheat, the remaining dancers were given a choreographed dance sequence to perform as a group. For this stage the choreographer was Carrie Ann Inaba (who was seen earlier this summer as one of the judges on Dancing With The Stars). They were also given a sequence in which they had to work with a partner, not a professional but one of the other contestants. At each stage more dancers were weeded out until finally a small number remained for an overall evaluation. Of these a handful were selected to go to LA.

Dance auditions are boring! That's the first thing that I came away from this whole experience with. Most of the people were doing hip-hop, or what they thought was hip-hop, with a lot of break dancing thrown in for good - or not so good - measure. There was one guy who admitted to having a callous on the top of his head from spinning so much on it. He said he'd rather spin than have hair anyway. In New York in particular there were also a larger than expected number of belly dancers - one came bearing a sword which she used as part of her routine, while another sported a rather impressive pair of breast implants - her most expensive dance accessories she called them. One of the male dancers - a young black man - was showing off a different set of assets. He was dressed in an open shirt and possibly the tightest pair of shorts possible; it almost looked as if that part of his body was covered with some form of latex, and this guy was the proud of owner of a pretty big package (I'm sure the PTC is mobilizing even as I write). He had some ballet training but lost nearly all of his credibility when he turned his dance sequence into a rhythmic gymnastics ribbon routine.

It amazed me that some of these people couldn't see just how bad they were. At one point I was reminded of the episode in the last cable season of The Paper Chase where Professor Kingsfield is out in California and walking around the streets. There's a moment where he stand half fascinated and half disbelieving as he watches some young people break dancing. I felt like Kingsfield, half fascinated and half disbelieving as I watched some of these people. I suddenly felt quite old. There were some people who basically refused to accept the decision of the producers. One guy became extremely foulmouthed after he was rejected, and one woman stated that the producer didn't know anything about dance. A Chicago belly dancer who didn't do well in the choreographed segment was mad that they wanted "typical European White People's dancing" although as far as I could tell she was white. That's not to say that there weren't some talented dancers - the woman with the implants turned out to be quite versatile although in the end she wasn't selected for Los Angeles (this is something I'll get to in a moment). People who had some dance training tended to do well. A salsa dancer showed off her skills as did a traditional Irish dancer.

Of course, as I said being a good dancer wasn't necessarily enough. A number of people who were excellent dancers were sent home. Not only did they have to balance male and female performers but on two or three occasions Nigel Lithgoe (who was also one of the producers of American Idol and also of the British Popstars and the Australian Pop Idol) stated that they didn't necessarily want the best dancers. Lithgoe stated openly that they were casting a TV show and as a result wanted people who were attractive, who had heart, or had some quality that would grab and hold the audience. There was one woman who had been a contestant on American Idol who qualified for Los Angeles despite being told that she wasn't dancing as "maturely" as her age. A young male dancer from Maryland was accepted despite - or more likely because - of his weight and inexperience. There were a number of similar cases.

I don't think that So You Think You Can Dance will be anywhere near as successful as American Idol or even Dancing With The Stars. Actually I don't think it will do well at all. It is eminently possible to make a star out of a singer. It happens all the time on Broadway in addition to the music industry. In most cases however dancers are not out in the forefront unless they are also singers or are in special areas like ballet or ballroom dancing. The way one dancer's 1930 era screen test was evaluated probably sums up how dancers are regarded in Hollywood and Broadway: "Can't act, can't sing, balding, can dance a little." If it weren't for the fact that he could sing, and could act, Fred Astaire probably wouldn't have been hired by RKO. If all he could do was dance he wouldn't have been let in the gates of RKO. I don't think that So You Think You Can Dance will be able to make stars out of dancers and I don't know that even with a cast of dancers with good looks and heart and all of the other qualities the producers are looking for can make a success out of this show.

The End Of Two Sumer Shows

I hadn't planned on writing anything today but then I remember that Wednesday night represented the finales for two popular summer series - Beauty And The Geek and Dancing With The Stars - so I figured I might as well do a quick recap.

I actually don't have much to say about Beauty And The Geek. The final episode seemed to drag a bit because there was no final activities. The challenges in previous weeks had been a major factor in the enjoyment of the show and something was missing without them. That's not to say that there wasn't something of interest. We were finally able to see Richard in a situation where he wasn't acting the fool. He actually seemed to be a pretty good piano player. Had he been able to show this side of his personality earlier in the series he might have seemed less aggravating to everyone else - both in the mansion and amongst those watching. That's not to say that Richard wasn't good TV and you have to wonder just how much of what he was doing was the real guy and how much of it was playing to the cameras. Certainly it was the combative Richard/Chuck relationship that became the principal area of conflict in the series rather than the male/female relationships. So I suppose it was fitting that the two big "stars" - and their female partners - faced each other in the final episode. There was a tremendous conflict in styles. Away from the piano Richard was doing an exceptionally good imitation of the young Woody Allen (I'd previously compared Richard to the character of Urkel, but I think the Wood-man is closer to the mark), obsessing over everything that possibly could go wrong and what they should focus on for studying. Meanwhile Chuck - always controlled and disciplined thanks in part to meditation and martial arts training - took the attitude that what happens is what is meant to happen. And that's what basically occurred. The final elimination was tightly fought and literally came down to Richard not knowing what Mindy's middle name was while Chuck knew what Caitilin's was.

As for Dancing With The Stars, let me just say that it grew on me to the point where, if I currently had a special lady in my life, I'd probably be willing to head off to Arthur Murray's for some dance lessons which would probably go better than the ones I had before my high school graduation - although anything would have been better than that. The truth is however that John O'Hurley and Charlotte Jorgenson were robbed, in part by the judges and in part by the scoring system which gave as much weight to audience opinion as it did to judges scores. There was no possible way that Kelly Monaco and Alec Mazo's free-style dance routine was worth 10s across the board while John and Charlotte's was only worth 9s. Monaco's footwork was suspect in my view and she seemed to stumble at least once. The three point difference in the scores for the freestyle was enough to give Kelly and Alec a one point lead overall in the night's voting which meant 2 points from the judges while John and Charlotte got one. The audience voting last week apparently was stronger for Kelly and Alec - why, I don't know although it might be that she's younger or that she's on an ABC soap and thus more visible - than for John and Charlotte. However it may not have mattered. If the professional judges hadn't been so blind (or, if you're cynical, hadn't been told how to vote) and given John and Charlotte two votes and Kelly and Alec one, a tie would have resulted which apparently would have been settled based on the previous week's audience vote, so John and Charlotte were screwed either way.

Suggestions: Since The WB has already announced that Beauty And The Geek will be returning (much to my friend Ian J. Ball's disgust - see his Summer Update - 06/23/05) and since ABC is sure to renew Dancing with the Stars although they're not quite sure yet when they'll put it into the lineup, I should like to offer the following suggestions.

Beauty And The Geek: Geekier looking geeks. Richard really was the "geekiest" of the males although Joe had his moments. On the other hand the network should also look for women who are also more the way the website describes them - intellectually impaired. Just as an example, Scarlett - eliminated last week - may be a model and actress but she also had a college GPA of 3.4, a degree on business and is considering going for her MBA. The same held true of some of the other women.

Dancing With The Stars: More stars, less Bergeron. That guy really started to annoy me after a while and it wasn't a very long while. The British, Australian and New Zealand versions of the show had 10 teams which would make the initial dances shorter but would extend the series a few more weeks. Also, keep it in the summer. It may have been a big ratings grabber in the summer but I don't think it would have fared as well against new scripted programming. Finally and most importantly, fix the scoring! Audience participation is fine but it was a disaster in the final episode to have the audience vote count equally with the votes of the professional judges. Why not have each judge's vote count separately and the audience preference count for a quarter of the final total. After all theyknow what they're looking for. Oh yeah, and bring back O'Hurley and Jorgenson next year for another face-off with Monaco and Mazo.

I Remember Them

There's a significant difference between British TV and American TV - and here I'm not talking about quality. Viewers on both sides of the Atlantic give producers on the other side of the Atlantic too much credit for their shows. American audiences get to see the best shows that the British produce and rate it better than American TV while British viewers are more likely to rave over American shows and pronounce that British programmes are crap. No, to my mind the big difference between British and American television is that the British are more willing to try different things. American networks seem to think that there are only four types of show that can possibly be on TV: dramas, sitcoms, reality shows, and news magazines (and there wouldn't be reality shows if the British and Europeans hadn't had huge successes with them first). Don't even get me started on the degree too which American producers limit the field in those genres.

The British, on the other hand, tend to look at things a little differently. True, there are dramas, sitcoms, reality shows and news magazines, but the British networks go a little further. They do shows like Ground Force (a gardening show), Changing Rooms (a home renovation show), The Antiques Roadshow (an antiques valuation show), and Top Gear (a show about new cars) in prime time on network TV. They do game shows - Who Wants To Be A Millionaire and The Weakest Link are still popular in Britain (in fact Ann Robinson recently recently provided her own voice for the new Doctor Who in her Weakest Link persona). And they do music. Four of the five major British Networks - BBC1, BBC2, ITV, and Channel 4 - have at least one music show. And we're not talking about something like American Idol (which originated in Britain as Pop Idol) either. Top Of The Pops and Later with Jools Holland are long running series that feature fairly major artists. The Beatles appeared on Top Of The Pops around the time of their first American tour, and Mick Jagger was on the show much later. The list of people who appeared on Top Of The Pops is staggering. Later With Jools Holland is a more recent show but it still has an impressive guest list.

The point is that neither of those shows would be on American network TV. About the only program that shows musical acts is Saturday Night Live. I don't know what it is about American network executives but they seem unwilling to do musical shows. Maybe they believe that they won't get the ratings or that the various acts will want too much money. Or maybe they think that this is what MTV was created for. The only music show on network TV in the United States is American Idol where the performers are wannabes - safe wannabes. Give the show credit, ratings are incredible. But although CBS tried reviving Star Search, no other network has really attempted to do a show that was primarily music. At least not until this summer when NBC brought us Hit Me Baby One More Time. Naturally it's imported from Britain, complete with host Vernon Kay. It's only on for five weeks which is two weeks more than it was originally set for thanks to ratings which apparently surprised NBC's network weasels, although they been slipping each week.

Still It's an interesting experiment. The show takes what the network flacks call "veteran hit makers" (and many viewers call one hit wonders) and has them perform one of their old hits (or their one hit) and then in the second half of the show has them cover a more contemporary song by a current artist (usually). Before the second song there's a "what are they doing now" segment - Thelma Houston has grandkids, Greg Kihn has written five novels, Billy Vera does voices for commercials and supplies material for compilation albums from the 1940s and '50s. The performers are in what initially appears to be a large club but is probably a large TV studio with plenty of floor space for fans, most of whom look as though they might have been conceived to some of this music. At the end of the episode there's a vote by the studio audience which determines the "best" performance. That act wins a $20,000 donation to a charity of their choice.

The typical route for a musician who has a hit, or even several hits, is a short roller coaster ride with three stages. Initially they take any gig that will pay them a little money living on credit in hopes that someone will take notice. Then someone does takes notice; they get a recording contract and do a song that touches people in some way. And then, because they can't make lightning strike twice, they're back to taking any gig that will pay them a little money, trying to get back on top until they finally realize that they aren't going to be back on top. If they're smart they didn't spend the money they made with their one hit on sex and drugs. From the look of most of the people on Thursday's episode, they did. Certainly Glass Tiger looked as though they don't have to worry about their credit rating or having their Ontario homes and lake properties repossessed. Did the years take their toll? Sure. I'm not sure that the voices were quite as good as when Thelma Houston and Club Nouveau were actually having their one hit, and Glass Tiger looks as though they haven't been missing many meals - or skipping the carbs for that matter - but they all look better than Keith Richard (of course most corpses look better than Keith Richard). So yeah, most of these acts hear themselves on the oldies stations as they do their morning commutes, but it's good to see and hear them today. I don't really care about the competition aspect, but it's original to the British series and if making this into a reality show is what it takes to sell the concept to an American network so be it.

This summer has given us two concepts - Dancing With The Stars and Hit Me Baby One More Time - which have been slotted into the "reality" series ghetto but are significantly different and dare I say it original. What I really hope is that ratings for Hit Me Baby One More Time will be strong enough that some visionary at an American network will decide that popular music will make for good network television. It doesn't necessarily have to be the big names but perhaps a mix of big names with the young up and comers - the possible one hit wonders twenty years from now - would work. But of course the American television industry doesn't have space for visionaries, except in the summer.

Well Apparently They Were

I thought that America wasn't ready for Dancing With The Stars and said so in my review. Apparently I was wrong, at least for the first episode. The overnight ratings are in and ABC scored an impressive (particularly for the summer) 10.6/16 rating with 13.23 million viewers. In the important 18-49 age group the show drew a rating of 4.2/12. This made it the highest rated show of the night. By contrast the show's lead-in, a Supernanny repeat, drew a 5.9/10 with 7.74 million viewers and an 18-49 rating of 2.4/6. The WB's Beauty and the Geek which was on opposite Supernanny had 3.5/6, 3.09 million viewers, and an 18-49 rating of 1.6/6 to finish 4th in the time slot.

Who knew?

Is America Ready For This?

Three new reality shows debuted tonight, two in the United States and one in Canada. Predictably I'm going to review the one which seems just slightly more innovative than the others - and also the one that I think will probably be the lowest rated, which in the summer of 2005 is saying a lot.

Every so often you come upon you come upon a train wreck. It may not have happened yet but you know it will. Dancing With The Stars is going to be a train wreck. I just don't know that the United States - or Canada for that matter - is ready for ballroom dancing on network TV, particularly when the dancing is done by people who have very little experience in ballroom dancing.

Ballroom dancing has achieved a new level of visibility recently. The 1996 Japanese movie Shall We Dansu? receive critical raves when it was eventually released in the United States, and was eventually remade last year as Shall We Dance? with Richard Gere, Susan Sarandon and Jennifer Lopez. ABC has describe Dancing With The Stars as an international sensation, and it is, although not always under that name. In Britain the series is known as Strictly Come Dancing and has featured UK media "stars" like comedian Julian Clary, David Dickinson (host of Bargain Hunt), and opera singer Leslie Garrett. The Australian version, also called Dancing With The Stars had veteran actor John Wood, Olympic Gold Medallist James Tomkins, and Home And Away Star Rebecca Cartwright, and there's a New Zealand version that's currently airing.

The show's format pairs a "star" with a professional ballroom dancer. Let's just say that some are more adept than others. In the US version of the show there are six teams (the British, Australian and New Zealand series had eight to ten). They are John O'Hurley (Seinfeld) with Charlote Jorgenson; four time Heavyweight Boxing champion Evander Holyfield with Edyta Sliwinska, Joey McIntyre (Boston Public and the band New Kids on the Block) with Ashley Delgrosso; Kelly Monaco (General Hospital) with Alec Mazo; supermodel Rachel Hunter with Jonathon Roberts; and reality star Trista (Rehn) Sutter (The Bachelor and Ryan & Trista Get Married) with Louis van Amstel.

The partners have had five weeks to work together to learn the various dance moves and to develop routines for each of 10 styles of dance. Following their training period the teams dance at a Los Angeles club in a live broadcast hosted by Tom Bergeron America's Funniest Home Videos. Here I think is part of the problem with the show. Instead of playing it straight, Bergeron decides to go for the cheap joke. Thus when talking about Rachel Hunter he mentions that even though shes a supermodel she "uses her powers for good." it's an old joke and it was a bad joke when it was new. I get the distinct feeling that Bergeron would rather be anywhere else. Fortunately Tom doesn't get to talk much, which is just as well because a little of him goes a long way. Then things go to the judges. The head judge is professional Ballroom Dancing Judge Len Goodman, who was also a judge on the British series Strictly Come Dancing and has been either dancing or judging dancing for most of his adult life. He's assisted by Hollywood choreographer Carol Ann Inaba, and Bruno Tonioli who was also on the British show and has worked with people like Elton John, Michael Jackson, Paul McCartney, Kate Winslet and Tina Turner. They each rate the dancers from 1 to 10 (Bergeron: "Which means that the tops score is thirty"). Finally viewers get a chance to vote American Idol style by phone or on-line.

The dancing was variable, ranging from slightly better than high school prom quality to not quite ready to enter a real competition. Teams had the choice of the Waltz or the Cha Cha Cha, and while no one truly embarrassed themselves in terms of screwing up, but a couple of these people shouldn't be allowed on a dance floor unless they're the ones getting married. Evander Hollyfield gave a particularly poor performance, mainly standing in place moving his arms and occasionally his feet while his partner Edyta moved around him. Allegedly he was doing the Cha Cha Cha. The dance that Rachel Hunter and Jonathon Roberts were doing was allegedly the Waltz, but it looked to ballet like for my definition of the Waltz. The worst judges' assessment waited for Kelly Monaco who was described as looking too stiff, "as if someone had died." The best dancers may have been the teams Joey McIntyre and Ashley Delgrosso and John O'Hurley and Charlotte Jorgenson (although I at least was impressed with Trista and Louis).

There were few if any problems with the live broadcast. There were a couple of times when Bergeron tried to talk over the crowd and the crowd won, and one incident where a camera literally lost a pair of dancers in the flare from a footlight, but those sort of things can almost be expected in a first broadcast. The judges were relatively mild in their assessments of the teams. There are no Simons in this group: the meanest comment was when Len said of some team: "A garden needs a mix of lawn and flowers. You were all lawn." It says something however that I can't remember which team he said it of.

I can see the appeal of Dancing With The Stars. Ballroom Dancing is a beautiful thing and even sensual thing when you're doing it (the dancing generations of the '50s and '60s have a lot to answer for), and if there's a market for hours of figure skating in the winter, then there should be a market for this. The trouble is that I don't know what that market is, and whether they'll be watching in sufficient numbers to give this show the ratings it would need to survive. The problem isn't that the people are "B" or even "C" list celebrities - on the whole television doesn't attract "A" list celebs at the best of times and this show isn't going to make a breakthrough in that area (well Robert Duval might be interested - he's a major fan of ballroom dancing to the point where he taught Waltz classes on the set of Lonesome Dove) - and loathe though I am to say it, the problem isn't Bergeron. The reason I don't expect the show to succeed is simply that it doesn't have the excitement and fire of an American Idol or the dramatic tension of a Survivor or even a Hell's Kitchen. Worse, despite the success of Shall We Dance? I don't believe there's as much interest in Ballroom Dancing in North America as there is in Britain and Australia. All of which saddens me slightly because unlike a show like The WB's Beauty And The Geek which also debuted Wednesday night (and which I'll review tomorrow after it re-airs) it at least has the advantage of originality.