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I just wanted to give a small rant...
WHY the hell is it, whenever there is a competition on TV, the producers feel the need to pad it out with the complete biography of the contestant, told in real time from when their GRANDPARENTS were born; before showing the actual competition?
Sometimes I can almost understand it when the actual competition is too short to fill out the entire time. But when you have enough contestants you're cutting/summarizing their runs, there shouldn't be any reason at all to be showing that sort of filler.
NBC is especially bad for it; the American Gladiators reboot a few years back failed IMO because they put in 15 minutes of sobstory for each competitor and 5 minutes of actual running the challenge. And of course, when NBC ran American Ninja Warrior a few weeks ago, it was the same thing. A 10 minute story of some guy's attempts to get to the obstacle course, only to see him fail the first challenge... Followed by a commercial break and a lameass "While you were on the break, 15 other people ran the course, 5 of them making it throuhg in amazing times, but we won't show you that. Instead, here's Joe Blow's heartbreaking story of how he got a hangnail training for the Salmon Ladder. I watched the final ep the night it aired; starting the recording when the show was about 70 minutes in... and after FFing through background and commercials, I caught up to Live with 15 minutes to spare. (long enough to watch a case on Judge Judy, and return to FF to the final run and see how well he did)
And while I'm not watching Olympic Coverage at all; I've heard NBC's coverage is similar to the above, which is disenheartening to say the least.
What's worst, is other shows are starting to do that format now. The Food Challenge Channel (Formerly known as the Food Network), has competitions every other hour it seems... and each one is 30 minutes of background on each competitor, 5 minutes of them banging on chopping boards, shaking pots and pans, and running to a pantry, 3 minutes of tasting, and 5 minutes of dead air *yawn*'suspense' before a winner is announced.
The saddest part of it is, is that most of these shows have more than enough 'action' to fill up twice the time they have without any filler. Either from more people running the course, or just showing more of the action of the ones you actually focused on. Plus cutting back on that sort of filler would cut down on the embarrassements like what AGT had this year with the Stuttering Texan Vet Singer.
*sigh* As I said on another board (and maybe another thread here) If Game shows were run like those competitions, Jeopardy would only need 3 answers an episode. The rest of the time would be filled telling us how Jimmy Bob studied his whole life to be on Jeopardy, but the chances were nearly scuttled when his mother was crushed under a fallen pile of encyclopedias; but he perserveered and now mom's in the wheelchair in the audience cheering him on.
WHY the hell is it, whenever there is a competition on TV, the producers feel the need to pad it out with the complete biography of the contestant, told in real time from when their GRANDPARENTS were born; before showing the actual competition?
Sometimes I can almost understand it when the actual competition is too short to fill out the entire time. But when you have enough contestants you're cutting/summarizing their runs, there shouldn't be any reason at all to be showing that sort of filler.
NBC is especially bad for it; the American Gladiators reboot a few years back failed IMO because they put in 15 minutes of sobstory for each competitor and 5 minutes of actual running the challenge. And of course, when NBC ran American Ninja Warrior a few weeks ago, it was the same thing. A 10 minute story of some guy's attempts to get to the obstacle course, only to see him fail the first challenge... Followed by a commercial break and a lameass "While you were on the break, 15 other people ran the course, 5 of them making it throuhg in amazing times, but we won't show you that. Instead, here's Joe Blow's heartbreaking story of how he got a hangnail training for the Salmon Ladder. I watched the final ep the night it aired; starting the recording when the show was about 70 minutes in... and after FFing through background and commercials, I caught up to Live with 15 minutes to spare. (long enough to watch a case on Judge Judy, and return to FF to the final run and see how well he did)
And while I'm not watching Olympic Coverage at all; I've heard NBC's coverage is similar to the above, which is disenheartening to say the least.
What's worst, is other shows are starting to do that format now. The Food Challenge Channel (Formerly known as the Food Network), has competitions every other hour it seems... and each one is 30 minutes of background on each competitor, 5 minutes of them banging on chopping boards, shaking pots and pans, and running to a pantry, 3 minutes of tasting, and 5 minutes of dead air *yawn*'suspense' before a winner is announced.
The saddest part of it is, is that most of these shows have more than enough 'action' to fill up twice the time they have without any filler. Either from more people running the course, or just showing more of the action of the ones you actually focused on. Plus cutting back on that sort of filler would cut down on the embarrassements like what AGT had this year with the Stuttering Texan Vet Singer.
*sigh* As I said on another board (and maybe another thread here) If Game shows were run like those competitions, Jeopardy would only need 3 answers an episode. The rest of the time would be filled telling us how Jimmy Bob studied his whole life to be on Jeopardy, but the chances were nearly scuttled when his mother was crushed under a fallen pile of encyclopedias; but he perserveered and now mom's in the wheelchair in the audience cheering him on.
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