Mreh @ TV, i.e. - american audiences suck

I'm not normally one of those people that goes crazy over TV shows. I usually take it for granted that shows I like will be renewed, and if they aren't, then oh well. I mean, I do get pissy when something I like is canceled or on the verge of cancellation, but I'm not some fat Joss Whedon fangirl (is that redundant?) that signs a bunch of e-petitions and goes to cons with a paper petition and makes t-shirts that they still wear 5 years after the show is canceled. But as of late with the economy (dun dun dun I finally dropped the E-bomb) the way it is networks are kinda slimming down their "pickins'" to nothing and the network that I thought was doing better than everyone is actually doing the worst out of the major four.

Apparently NBC is shit at this point. It's funny how quickly things can change, Heroes was this "breakout hit" and then the next season they're calling it crap. With shows like The Office (which I don't watch for the most part), 30 Rock (which I don't watch but heard is good), My Name is Earl, the aforementioned Heroes, that Life show that I hated (which I assumed would make it wonderful in the ratings) and all of those crappy Law & Order shows that everyone seems to love, I figured that NBC was on the top of the heap. How mistaken I was.

So that brings me to my point of order: Chuck. Chuck is apparently on the precipice of getting hucked off the TV cliff. I like Chuck, a lot. I have sat idly by and watched The Riche$ get canceled, 10 Items or Less (even though it might've deserved it in its 3rd season) and many others I'm sure I'm forgetting that did not make the cut. And if there were superior-performing shows around I wouldn't be too miffed about Chuck riding the cancellation fence, but goddamn. First, I'd like to preface this rant with a fact or two. One, NBC is paying Jay Leno a varitable mint to do his show at 10 PM five nights a week, this working two-fold: one being that dumping more money into Mr. Leno's pockets means less money to make more shows with and two -- perhaps more importantly -- it eliminates five hours of primetime programming from the lineup every week. Also, Chuck goes up against Fox's House every week, and has been since the beginning of this season, that's gotta spell doom for every show up against it. House is pretty much Fox's number one show, it's #1 in the scripted department and only loses to American Idol (groan) in terms of overall viewership. I love House. In fact, House is the only show that I will drop everything for to watch, even if I've seen the ep 20 times already.

That said, there are a lot of shows that are just awful that I cannot fathom how they stay on the air, other than audiences having really bad tastes. Now I'm not even going to bother bringing up Lost, because that's a moot point. I will, however bring up FRINGE and Dollhouse and Lie to Me. I've pretty much made peace with the fact that shitty shows like Dancing with the Stars and American Idol are cash cows and cost the network little to nothing and enthrall the dumbass masses. Fringe began airing at the same time as Chuck, and I watched both. I thought that Chuck had kind of a silly premise at first, but it quickly grew on me. Fringe never really held my interest at all, and when they brought the stereotypical characters in, the crappy "plot" and compared it to the X-Files -- ew. Then it became "acclaimed", wow, I thought, "People cannot have that bad a taste in shows." Then that Lie to Me show came along, and that was gimmicky, poorly cast, poorly acted and generic. Somehow this show is probably getting a renewal. And Dollhouse, despite having the combination of getting the Friday night death slot and being abyssimal, has somehow weaseled it's way to "50-50" on getting a renewal.

And all you can blame are the numbers. The studio isn't really at fault. If not enough people watch a show, it's gone. TV is a business, afterall. So that brings me to the conclusion that the typical viewer in this country has a room temperature IQ and loves repetitive, regurgative idiocy and loathes new and innovative entertainment. They also love namesakes, Southland is made by the creators of ER and I can guarantee that'll get picked up, and Law & Order and all of its incarnations are in like their 20,000th seasons now, right? I don't see them getting canceled anytime soon. And don't tell me that the idea of karaoke being televised and then judged and then spit back into 6 other forms like dancing, is innovative.

An expensive mistake...

Yes, this was $160 (with shipping).

So about 4 and a 1/2 years ago now I began my regrettable flirtation with World of Warcraft. In the summer of 2004 I got a copy of Final Fantasy XI because I was still an FF fanboy. FFXI would work for sporadic amounts of time and freeze my computer. Also, it wasn't that fun. Fast forward a few months to September-October, my best friend gets a beta copy of World of Warcraft. Now I've always loved the Warcraft series, and Blizzard lore in general. I saw how much deeper and more graphically pleasing this game was than FFXI, and was sold. I played on and off for the next 4 years, getting utterly disinterested and quitting, and then coming back for more punishment, generally when new content like an xpac came out. But ultimately I dropped the habit in January and really have zero interest in returning -- for any reason.

Thus began my ritualized monthly throwing of $15 into the sewer, as well as countless hours of my life (actually Blizzard has a function in the game where you can type /played and see how much you've played on that character. I never bothered with a final total, though.). Now as if flushing a percentage of my life down the toilet, as well as enough for 2 or 3 car payments, wasn't bad enough, Blizzard found its way into my -- and many others' -- pockets other ways too.

A few years after the explosive popularity of WoW, Blizzard released a trading card game based around the game. This TCG had one major difference from others based on popular franchises -- the invention of the loot card. Loot cards were special cards inserted in packs at a certain ratio that when scratched off and entered into the Blizzard/Upper Deck website, allowed you to get some goofy trinket, mount or other cosmetic thing that didn't affect the game in any way but were fun nonetheless. Not being a particular fan of TCGs the idea of the loot cards intrigued me, but I wasn't about to buy boxes and boxes of cards to get an in-game item. Enter the enterprising souls on ebay. Over time I bet I spent over $250 on loot cards for in-game crap. I had the Hippogryph Hatchling, Goblin Gumbo Kettle, Paper Flying Machine Kit, D.I.S.C.O., Picnic Set, and Goblin Personal Weather Maker. I'm really glad I didn't end up getting the Onyxia Kite or Spectral Tiger mount, two of the most expensive loot card items on ebay.

Though I spent less on this item, because it was all in one lump sum, and I didn't get to have fun with it in-game like the other stuff, I guess I'm regretful of it more than the cards. The item in question? A Figureprint. Figureprints are representations of 3-D model data fed by a program into a machine that interprets and configures them into an "action" figure. More like a statue, and I'm convinced that these are little more than fancy papercraft (they look like painted styrofoam when you look at them up close). I think the technology to create these is probably amazing, but could ultimately use refining. Anyway, Figureprints hooked up with Blizzard and started producing scale representations of your character for like $100. Originally, and for about 2 years they had a lottery that governed who was able to throw their cash at FP to have a figure of their character made. When I got my chance, the price went up to $140 for some reason. I was in the last 2 months of the lottery, which made it even less special when a big news item came out 8 weeks later saying "Get all the Figureprints you want now!" and I got my FP like a week after that, lulz. (Yeah they take a while to make) Supposedly before, with the lottery system, you had to enter every month. I had quit for about 9 months when I got the news that I had been drawn as a winner in the FP drawing for November. The xpac was one reason I started playing again, but the fact that you had to have an active WoW account to get a Figureprint made was a big baiting factor as well. I honestly think that Blizzard used this on "retired subscribers" as a ploy to get them to play again. Being that they retired the lottery system a scant 2 months later. I'm now trying to offload my personal Figureprint for $50 on ebay (nearly 2/3 of the price off), but honestly, who wants to buy a figure of someone else's character?

I would honestly love to sell my account because I think people would pay a decent amount for the loot cards alone, and the fact that I have an 80 DK with some tier 7.5 gear and a Mechano-hog, plus a 77 lock with epics and over 50 mounts, etc, cosmetic stuff that people that want to buy "pretty shinies" look for. But I've heard that most account sales, unless done in person are scam-worthy. And there are companies that buy your account, but I don't necessarily want some "company" rummaging through my personal data in Blizzard's files, because who knows what Blizz keeps on file even though they claim to have deleted all relevant financial data. I'm not about to give over the contents of my bank account over a matter of $200-300 for my blood, sweat and tears.

I did make $40 profit on my Blizzard Authenticator keyfob that is now apparently sold out at the Blizzard store, that originally cost $6.50. I was paranoid about account security, but by the time I got it, I'd quit, so hey why not make a profit? I also managed to sell my Talking Murloc from Jinx for about $20 over the retail, so... In the end, I really wish I hadn't bought the Figureprints figure of my lock, but the cards weren't really that regretable a decision, and I profitted off of the rest. =P

Dead by comparison: Chopping Block vs. Hell's Kitchen

A few weeks back the show The Chopping Block debuted on NBC, and as I'm not a real TV-o-phile unless I know a show I like is flagging, I just assumed that it was doing okay. The big tagline surrounding the show was that Marco Pierre White had made Chef Gordon Ramsay cry when he was training him or whatever. I got sucked into the hype a little bit. I was also enthused by the first ep because the people that were on here seemed to not be so "organic" as was the case in a lot of contestants on Hell's Kitchen. So after seeing the first episode I told a friend just that. I think it went something like: "This Chopping Block show is good, it doesn't have that white trashy element that a lot of the Hell's Kitchen groups have had so far."

But after the "new" wore off, it was exactly that that was the problem. All of those people in the first episode that were "new and refreshing", were now just the opposite, boring and cardboard. The show played out like something you'd see on Food Network or Home & Garden -- this was primetime, not cable showing you how to make a souflee. Not even this supposedly merciless Marco was being pushy, let alone showing this mysterious fierceness that put Ramsay on his ass or whatever. Honestly it wasn't even like Marco was in charge, it was more like he was an observer or something, he always seemed very disaffected or disinterested and like he was there in a narrative capacity more than a chef.

The contestants weren't much better. Hell's Kitchen makes you feel like -- for better or worse -- the people vying for the title they're driving at really need that job. (Which couldn't be further from the truth, apparently, if you read the Wiki about what the winners of each season are doing now. One even turned down the initial job immediately after they won it.) The people on The Chopping Block all seem to range from "Weeeeell me and my friend thought this might make a neat weekend project!" to, "Well we already have a diversified portfolio and a chain of restaurants back home but we're looking to expand." Thus making you not really give a shit about them. Individually, the people don't seem that interesting, in fact I can't remember a single person's name or what their backstory is from TCB. Aaaaaand apparently I wasn't the only one. The Chopping Block failed hardcore, being replaced after only 3 episodes (With episodes of fucking law and order no less. No show deserves that fate.).

So I ate my initial words. Everyone knows I'm not a reality fan at all, so it's a miracle that I like either of these shows. And I think I do like them because they are reality. The situations may be set up for the purpose of sifting through the garbage so to speak, but this will be an actual job opportunity for someone. It isn't B-list celebs and fucking Steve-O and other retards dancing around with bimbos, or some mental-defective, deranged idiot or rich little snot trying to caterwaul for some drugged up bitch and self-aggrandizing English egomaniac. I respect Ramsay, he didn't bullshit his way into the limelight, he doesn't pretend to be anything he's not.

The one thing these two shows do have in common is the fact that for any reality show to work, you need your dramatic idiot types with weak character and little to no skills and then you need your "the drama's in there but you have to work to draw it out of me" with skills-balanced type. Of course there are varying degrees of these two extremes, but I guess what I'm trying to say is you need drama to make it work. You need people that are going to react. If you just throw in a bunch of professionals that are going to do everything right into the kitchen together, no one's going to tune in. If you throw a bunch of people that know how to cradle themselves and cry and fight and piss and moan at each other but have no skills -- well then you really don't have a show, at least not one with a goal. Hell's Kitchen normally has a cast that has this catalyst in a mixture where the results are entertaining. You may or may not give a crap about them as people, or about who wins, but the rotating HK cast is most certainly entertaining more often than not.

The Chopping Block had that drama, but not in the right mixture. There were people that butted heads, but not really in an entertaining way. You need to set it up so there is a dominant type and another dominant type going head-to-head, maybe more than a few in some instances. TBC had a few people that were bitchy and bullied others, but the other side either blew them off or relented, and that just isn't interesting television. By comparison, Hell's Kitchen this season had a cast where I did not find myself rooting for anyone but that's okay because I did want people off of there, which is equally as good a catalyst for continued-watching. I thought pretty much everyone on HK this season was obnoxious. If I was really hard-pressed to pick someone that I wanted to win, it'd be Andrea. I'm convinced there's a "fodder" catergory that they use to pick applicants that are for sure not going to make it to the end, how else would you explain Lacey -- the bitchiest lardass that ever existed's presence? I'm really glad that HK is returning for its 6th and 7th seasons, the 6th being broadcast in July (yay!), and hopefully the cast will remain as reactionary and pushy as ever.