Jack Bauer, at the start of season 1

Consider this – Jack Bauer has served CTU under five different presidents: the guy before David Palmer, David Palmer, Wayne Palmer, Charles Logan, and Alison Taylor.  He’s faked his own death, gotten hooked on heroin, and served time in a Chinese prison.

From ESPN’s loquacious Gregg Easterbrook, one of his loyal readers has pulled together this Bauer timeline:

I noted that on “24,” Jack Bauer saves critical minutes by traveling during commercials. Kevin Woods of Santa Rosa, Calif., provides further details on time dilation in the series: “In the first season, in 2001, Jack was a highly successful federal agent with a 15-year-old daughter. Although Jack’ age was never stated, he had to be at least 40. He was a college graduate who had received his master’s in criminology, then joined the U.S. Army, reaching the rank of captain in the prestigious Delta Squad. After the Army, he worked for Los Angeles SWAT team, then joined the CIA in its clandestine wing. After this, he was recruited to the CTU, the mysterious agency where Jack toils when the series begins. Jack had to be 40 when the series began.

“Let’s assume 43. Here is where the time line gets tough. Season 2 was 18 months after season 1, making Jack 44-45. Season 3 was three years after season 2, making Jack about 47-48. Season 4 was 18 months after season 3, making Jack about 50. Season 5 was 18 months after season 4, making Jack about 52. Season 6 was 20 months after season 5, making Jack about 54. 24-Redemption, a two-hour movie that supposedly tied things together, was four years after season 6, making Jack about 58. Season 7, happening shortly after Redemption, still has Jack at around 58. Season 8, looks to be two-three years after season 8, because Jack's grand-daughter is seen having conversations with him, making Jack around 60 years [old]. He's quite spry for 60! Also, add up the years and it is now 2014 in the series. Maybe that explains all the CTU super-technology that does not seem to exist in our reality.”

That's after 20 years of living right.

Now Mr. Woods of Santa Rosa is playing a little loose with the rounding up, and not knowing Jack Bauer’s birthday it’s tough to be precise. However, even with tightening up the estimates, Jack Bauer is 58 years old. May we all be so healthy on the edge of 60.

via Brett Favre and the Minnesota Vikings were brought down by Favre’s fatal flaw – ESPN.

It’s a lengthy, Kubrick-styled tracking shot behind the scenes of “The Shining”, and as with most things Kubrick, the attention to detail is astonishing. There isn’t much there for non-Kubrick fans, and might not wow casual viewers into tuning in, but it’s an uncompromising treat for members of the cult of Kubrick.

Perhaps I’m so awed by this because Kubrick’s been on my mind lately. Recent viewings of Full Metal Jacket, 2001, and Dr. Strangelove (thank you Universal HD Movies – you should really look into licensing this spot for your own run of Kubrick films, by the way) has gotten me ruminating on the icy obsessions in his work. I’ve been clamoring for high-def screenings of the less famous Kubrick works – Lolita and Barry Lyndon.  I even recently attempted to watch Eyes Wide Shut, and was dismayed when UHD switched it out for the other Tom Cruise obsession and desire flick, the awful cinematic travesty Vanilla Sky.

Regardless, this promo isn’t a one-note gimmick, it exudes a reverence for the subject and the source material that you would never see on American television. Stateside promos shamelessly chase after what was cool ten minutes ago, network executives feel that there’s far too much at stake to push any sort of edgy, non-branded content. And the neurosis over being “cool” leads to cramming as much evocative sound design and swirling-nebula graphics as possible into each :20 spot. Crafting a :65 spot that unfolds with a deliberately creepy and engrossing rhythm would never, ever fly on American television.

Maybe my career work in promo has biased me against domestic television sales. This spot, though, is a beautiful piece of work. Would this work on American television? Could you see CBS or ABC running something this languid and compelling for “Lost” or “CSI”?

If you’ve missed the link above, the promo can be seen HERE.

The bad news is that ABC is prepping an Americanized version for the fall and it’s going to be awful. So it’s time to break radio silence. Find a torrent site, search Ebay for DVDs and buy a PAL DVD player, or scramble around online anywhere you can and download Life On Mars.

There’s only two 8 episode seasons of the British version, so it’ll be quick to pull down. If the powers that be won’t make it legally available – because they’re prepping a vastly inferior version – then civil disobedience to the IP laws of the land is the only option.

The premise of Life On Mars is simple. DI Sam Tyler (that’s Detective Inspector for us Yanks) is an obsessed, procedure loving detective chasing a serial killer in London in 2007. He gets hit by a car while investigating, and wakes up in 1973 as a junior detective working for the blustery DCI Gene Hunt. The opening credits ask the question – is he mad, in a coma, or has he really gone back in time?

It’s a simple gimmick, and the first episode plays out like a goof on the CSI procedurals. DI Tyler is used to extensive lab reports and forensic science tests. In 1973, it takes two weeks to match a fingerprint. Civil rights are an alien concept. Women and minorities can’t be taken seriously as detectives – even by themselves. And DCI Hunt is a garrulous English redneck, happy to beat a confession out of any poor sot in his interrogation room just so he can get to the pub by five.

What unfolds from there is some of the most engrossing television to have aired in years. Imagine Lost if it promised a satisfying resolution without jerking the audience around. Imagine Battlestar Galactica with a sense of humor. Imagine House playing out as a semi-surreal detective show.

Life On Mars is a deftly nuanced show. The overall questions of what is real or imagined never drown the police drama. The culture clash of 1973 and 2007 is deftly handled. The attention to period detail and cop shows from the 1970’s is immaculate. Only producing 16 episodes allowed the producers to craft an engaging mystery with a satisfying, but still slightly ambigous ending. And most impressively, all these elements are blended together to create something incredibly unique and satisfying.

If you’ve enjoyed any of the stellar BBC generated productions of the last decade (like The Office or Top Gear – which, incidentally, is my current pick for the best show on television), then tracking down Life On Mars in the original version is imperative. If you’re a fan of quality television, and can appreciate drama like The Wire or The Sopranos for their artistry, then Life On Mars is a must-see.

So when ABC announced that it had the rights to an American re-make, my heart sank. Then I saw the upfront presentation that ABC played for advertisers to drum up their excitement for the show, and I got ill. When that presentation missed the boat with their music cues, I got outraged. The title is derived from a David Bowie song with lyrics heavy on alienation, outrage, and larger than life movie images.

Wonder if he’ll ever know
He’s in the best selling show.
Is there life on Mars?

The ABC presentation keeps the title Life On Mars, but falls back on the goofy, populist disco of KC & The Sunshine Band. “Get Down Tonight” would be better served pushing the CBS fiasco Swingtown. The shiny, harmonious, and upbeat disco song is an entire world away from Bowie’s piercing wail and dissonant lyrics. Gone is the introspection and alienation, wiped away with a goofy 70’s cop show that resembles the Beastie Boys video for Sabotage.

When the news came down that two weeks ago, when other shows are up and running at full speed for the fall, they were re-casting and changing show runners, all hope was lost. Supposedly the whole cast is getting re-tooled except the lead actor. This obliterates the one glimmer of hope that the presentation showed – casting Star Trek: The Next Generation veteran Colm Meany as the boisterous Gene Hunt. In the BBC series, Philip Glenister was the incendiary star of the show, and one of the most indelible characters that any television series has seen. Colm Meany, aside from hailing from Wales, seemed to capture the leonine aggression of Glenister’s incomparable work. Now even that’s gone, as the thick-headed John O’Mara seems to be the only remaining element from the ABC presentation.

During the NBA finals, ABC is running promos for Life On Mars that are about as bad as promos can get. Now this is as thankless a promo assignment as it gets. Advertise a show where you can only show one cast member, using a song that’s completely inappropriate for the feel of the show. Watch for it on Tuesday’s game 6 and weep. Because they can only show Jason O’Mara, and since the new pilot is being shifted from LA to NYC, they can’t even show him in action, all you see is a mud colored shot of an indistinguished actor on a dull background.

TV promos don’t get worse than this. And TV series can’t go off the rails any worse than this. The original pilot presentation is available on the internet, but I won’t contaminate my site with any links to it. If I can find the ABC promo, I’ll provide a second-by-second breakdown of everything that’s horrible about it. And if you can find the original version of Life On Mars anywhere, go get it. It’ll be the best thing you do for yourself this summer.

Whether this re-make disappeared off the radar because of changing audience tastes, or because it was supremely witless and inept, we’ll never know. Either way, audiences are lucky that this dreadful mis-fire will soon be buried in DVD remainder bins. Summarizing the plot holes and Knight Rider-level cliches would be tiresome. The only point of interest in this dreadfully tedious affair is as a measuring stick, a point of reference for how far science fiction has regressed.

Originally a novel by Michael Crichton, and filmed for the first time in 1971, the story is about a team of scientists who race to find a cure for a mysterious pathogen that crashed to Earth. The original film is a worthwhile piece of work. On the surface, it’s awkward and dated. The main laboratory set is a late 60’s version of cutting-edge modernity. It’s bright and clean, Kubrick-influenced sterility. The scientists are square-jawed and non-descript, blank cogs with little more than dot-matrix printers at their disposal.

Now, in the post-Matrix world, science has to be dimly lit with green fluorescent bulbs. Labs are built like submarines, and scientists stare at automated beakers controlled by hyperintelligent computers. The scientists are all attractive automatons, differentiated only by a daytime television cliche.

The re-make re-invents almost nothing from the original novel. Since the scientists actually do very little science, the script pads out the running time with plenty of pseudo-science, giving every actor a chance to graft on some ludicrous exposition without actually explaining a thing. One of the most curious deletions in the re-make is the entry procedure into the high tech lab.

In the book, and in the 1971 version, entering the lab was a lengthy, multi-day process of decontamination. The scientists were symbolically purified from the outside in, stripping away layer after layer of contaminants until they reached the most medically pure state Crichton’s science could conceive of at the time.

It’s a fascinating sequence, especially in the novel, where the reader is confronted with a long inventory of potentially hazardous organisms that cover your body from hair to toenails. “We’ve faced up to quite a planning problem here. How to disinfect the human body — one of the dirtiest things in the known universe — without killing the person at the same time,” Crichton writes.

The 2008 version dispenses with such poetry – preferring instead a hybrid montage of showering shots that fetishize water droplets, feet, and shampoo suds. And that, in a nutshell, is a metaphor for the complete failure of the modernized re-make.

The 1971 version of The Andromeda Strain still holds together. It’s a tight, claustrophobic story that draws tension from paranoia and a fear of the unknown. The 2008 re-make drowns out tension in an avalanche of memes, desperately reaching out for relevance and ironically, finding relevance only as a yardstick of failure.

Forty years from now we’ll be laughing at the current design concepts that ‘high-tech’ means inefficient lighting and space station architecture. And hopefully the next people who remake The Andromeda Strain understand that story is more than just randomly running your mouth, and that newer does not mean better when it comes to science.

In the most recent season of South Park, Trey Parker and Matt Stone turned their satirical eye on viral internet videos. In Canada On Strike, the main characters try to create an internet sensation so they can earn millions of dollars. What they learn instead is that the internet is a wild (and in the show, deadly) frontier that nobody has mastered.

The episode’s masterstroke is the sweet and naïve Butters singing and dancing to a song “What What (in the butt)”. The original “What What (In The Butt)” is one of the most viewed videos on YouTube – over 11 million views and counting. There is also a side-by-side comparison of the original video with the South Park copy, that reveals the close attention to detail that Parker and Stone paid to the source.

The original Samwell video was created by Bobby Ciraldo and Andrew Swant, who have a Milwaukee-based production company called Special Entertainment, with a subsidiary imprint, Brownmark Films. In addition to its YouTube success, the video was embraced by the blogosphere and many mainstream media outlets as well. The runaway internet success of “What What (In The Butt)” put them squarely in the crosshairs of the internet exploitation that South Park parodied, and in an interview, they reflect on the aftermath.

They also have a number of projects in the works. A new Samwell video is in the works, and their feature length project William Shatner’s Gonzo Ballet is poised for release this summer. They can be reached via their website at www.BrownmarkFilms.com.

Q: Before the episode of South Park aired, did Trey Parker and Matt Stone contact you for permission to parody the Samwell video? What was that process like?
BROWNMARK FILMS: We were completely surprised by the South Park homage — we were never contacted by anyone at South Park. We each had random friends call us up to say, “Dude! Your video is on South Park!”

Neither of us have cable so we had to run to our local bar – The Uptowner – they turned off the juke box and turned on Comedy Central just for us. When Butters’ “What What In the Butt” video came on we thought we were dreaming. We sent Trey and Matt a thank you email the next day but never heard back.

Q: Are you South Park fans? How did you like Butter’s version? Did Samwell appreciate it, too?

BROWNMARK FILMS: We’ve both been fans for a long time. Matt & Trey are incredibly smart. And Team America is a very important film.

[We think] the Butters version is great! Butters really stepped up to the plate and gave it everything he had, but let’s face it: he’s not as mysteriously unnerving as Samwell. Check out Samwell’s smile at 1:27. But seriously, the attention to detail they put into the Butters version is very flattering. It’s a full minute, shot-for-shot remake of something we put a lot of work into, by a show we respect a TON.

Samwell’s pretty excited too. In his 2nd YouTube interview, which predates the Butters version, he says he loves South Park: “I love South Park. What a BAD show. But I LOVE it!”

Q: A big point of the “South Park” episode is that internet videos don’t generate any money for their creators. You created a huge internet sensation; did you earn any money from the video? Or from the “South Park” licensing?

BROWNMARK FILMS: Brownmark [Films] recently became a “YouTube Partner,” which means we get a portion of YouTube’s advertising revenue for our videos. We became partners three months ago and so far we haven’t seen a check yet, so in a way it’s hilariously just like the “waiting room scene” in the South Park episode – we’re waiting for our theoretical money. And since South Park never contacted us about licensing, we didn’t earn any money there!

Q: Do you feel that the You Tube and South Park fame has translated to opportunities to make money in other arenas? What did the 10 million plus page views do for you?

BROWNMARK FILMS: A lot of friends ask if the “What What” video has made us rich, but even after 10 million views we haven’t really made any money from it. The cool thing, though, is that some doors have become slightly more open because of the video’s exposure and popularity. For example, Elvira (Mistress of the Dark) was already a fan of the “What What” video when we approached her to do a cameo voice-over for Leslie Hall’s “Zombie Killer” video. It’s given us a little bit of street cred, in a weird way.

Getting something to be popular on the internet is the new frontier, everybody’s scrambling to crack the code.

Q: Do you have crossover aspirations to television, feature films, and traditional media? Or are you committed to the internet, and alternative distribution outlets?

BROWNMARK FILMS: Commercial ads on television make us want to kill. One-hour shows have 16 minutes of advertising, and often times they’re the same ads over and over again. That probably explains why we’re not big TV watchers in the “real-time” sense, but we do watch a lot of TV on rented DVDs from the local video store or NetFlix. We’re both huge Battlestar Galactica fans, for example. And we love the original Star Trek. And Nova.

We have crossover aspirations for all formats. We have TV show concepts, feature film scripts, and webisode plans. We hope that the release of Hamlet A.D.D. and Gonzo Ballet will bring us closer to cutting some bigger film and television deals, but in the mean time we’re happy to keep distributing our ideas through the internet. We have three main goals: to get people to smile, think, and communicate. We’re really interested in memetics [ed. note – small cultural concepts that are replicated, modified, and evolve as they pass on, like viral videos, remixes, and video responses], so the internet is kind of a dream come true… Find something that’s funny or interesting and pass it on. We’re not going to change the world with the “What What” video, but 10 million views means we got some gears turning and some people talking.

Q: What projects do you have coming up? And have you ever felt stigmatized as “internet video one-hit wonders”?

BROWNMARK FILMS: Hamlet A.D.D. is a big project that we have been working on for a long time. The “What What” video was a fun way to take a break and test out some of the visual and comedic ingredients that are going into Hamlet A.D.D. It was also a fun experiment in making a friend into a star — Sam’s small part in our Hamlet film (shot long before “What What”’s popularity) is now a full-blown celebrity cameo appearance!

There’s been no fallout. It may not be possible for “What What” to have much of a backlash, since it will always have a healthy supply of haters. There is nothing more honorable to us than having a cultural “hit”, whether it’s a one-time thing or not. To paraphrase William Shatner’s “Has Been” song, think of all those people who never get out of their armchairs to accomplish anything!

Sketch comedy is like pop music – it comes in so many flavors and styles that a comprehensive list is almost a task in futility. It comes as an incredible surprise, then, that Nerve.com (the sub-par Salon) not only has the temerity to try and rank the 50 greatest pieces of sketch comedy of all time, but that their list is so damn accurate.

The Nerve list covers an incredible amount of comic ground. The historical tent-poles of sketch comedy are well represented – Saturday Night Live, Monty Python, and Kids In The Hall. The list gains credibility, though, from a deep historical reach. Your Show Of Shows, Sid Caesar, and The Four Yorkshiremen (featuring a pre-Monty Python John Cleese) all make the list. The best part of the list is that almost all of the listings have a link to the sketch on You Tube, giving you the chance to re-watch a favorite and get acquainted with one you’ve never seen before. The Sid Caesar/Nanette Fabray argument to Beethoven’s Fifth is a spectacular piece of performance.

Inevitably, one of your favorites has been left off the list, and every comedy afficionado out there can argue some of the rankings. Kudos to Nerve.com for putting together such a comprehensive list, and let the debating begin over their few errors and omissions.

The 50 Greatest Comedy Sketches Of All Time

The odds are that CSI: Miami is either a show you love, or a show you love to hate. Whichever camp you fall into, it’s a certainty that your opinion of the show’s star, David Caruso is the defining feature of your opinion.

Since its 2002 premiere, it has consistently ranked in Nielsen’s top 10 shows. One study claims that it is the most watched show in the world, based on internationally aggregated top ten ratings.

The last show to lay claim to that title was Baywatch, and both shows have a fair amount in common. They’re silly, two-dimensional cutouts; liberally sprinkled with bikinis, music driven montages, and non-linear storytelling that translates easily to foreign languages. If it barely adds up in English, then translating it to Russian, Vietnamese, or Swahili can’t hurt. But where Baywatch was content to cheaply sell T&A to afternoon audiences, CSI: Miami is dedicated to pushing the boundaries of style.

While talk of the best shows on television inevitably revolves around the dramatic heft of The Wire, Battlestar Galactica, or The Sopranos, few discussions look at the other end of the spectrum. CSI: Miami draws millions more viewers on a weekly basis, and in a populist medium, that’s a significant metric. The lesson here is that quality and artistry are not synonymous. If producing fluff was easy, the radio waves would be flooded with a hundred successful Britney Spears clones. There are imitators, to be sure, but the key word is ‘successful’. Vacuity is as hard to achieve as substance, perhaps harder.

There’s nothing middle-of-the-road about CSI: Miami and nothing else quite like it on television. It has long since transcended its origin as a spin-off police procedural, and has become a unique hybrid – equal parts soap opera, eye candy, and David Caruso’s ego.

The heart of the show is Caruso’s singular creation, Lieutenant Horatio Caine. Every episode kicks off with Caine standing rock-still, gravely presiding over a crime scene before uttering a cynical, bad action movie witticism. (A great montage of his one-liners is available on You Tube.)

Less a man and more a demi-god, he exudes a lunatic unpredictability. His body is rigid, yet prone to moving in sinuous, unexpected ways – he hunches, stares, or removes his sunglasses seemingly at random. Watching him is like watching an autistic savant calculate impossibly long prime numbers; he’s tuning into something completely invisible to mortal men. It’s a performance that’s a far cry from parody, though, because Caruso has small-screen charisma to burn.

On set, Caruso is fixated on finding a very particular groove for Caine. In between sips of diet Coke, he ranges freely through his dialogue, often re-inventing it outright. The rest of the cast delivers the script exactly as written; Caruso shuffles his lines or simply re-writes them on the fly. The infamous one-liners that close the tease of each episode are rarely – if ever – delivered as scripted. During my time producing promos for the show, I don’t remember the quip from the shooting script ever remotely matching what Caruso delivered on set.

My favorite moment from the dailies happened while shooting on location. Normally, when he loses his flow, Caruso will cut his own take with a shake of his head and a call for some diet Coke. Only this once, Caruso blanked mid-take and called out to the script supervisor for his next line. Off-camera, a voice shouts “Frank, it looks like homicide.”

Not a half-second later, Caruso said “This looks like murder, Frank.”

It’s not just the ‘money’ lines of dialogue he re-crafts; it’s all of it – from the minor bits of exposition to the major speeches. High minded critics might dismiss that as egotism and bad celebrity behavior, but it’s hard to argue with results. Whether you’re cheering for him or laughing at him, Caruso is a singular presence on television. What he’s created in Horatio Caine is incomparable; even if it will be parodied for years, he’s achieved something unique. It took three decades for Shatner’s overacting Kirk to gain icon status, something Caruso attained in less than three years. There isn’t another television star who divides the audience so sharply, while being watched by both ends of the spectrum.

The rest of CSI: Miami is held together purely by Caine’s gravity. In the last few years, there have been serial killers, doomed romances, murdered wives, lost sons, pregnancy scares, undercover moles, a long lost brother, kidnappings, amnesia, gambling problems, drug possession, and most recently, an extradition to Brazil. The stories are ludicrous, and the presented motives for murder are nearly non-sensical. The good news is that Caruso’s hyper-solemn manner destroys any need for plausibility. Nobody watches this show for content – it’s all the style.

There isn’t a better looking show on prime-time, high-definition television than CSI: Miami. The fictional Miami is a volatile city of gold, exploding with impossibly over-saturated color. How many police labs in America are suffused with lime green and tangerine orange lighting? How many coroners show up at crime scenes in white linen suits and four inch heels? It’s a glamorous, immigrant’s dream of Miami… blending Scarface, telenovellas, and slavish celebrity worship into a modern mélange. Much as Dallas epitomized wealth and success in the 80’s and Beverly Hills, 90210 did in the 90’s, CSI: Miami is a vision of how the ‘have-nots’ dream life is like for the ‘haves’.

Television is essentially where America dreams, and embodying the roiling, contradictory desires of the national subconscious is a far more difficult task than it appears. The failed attempts are too numerous to count, and CSI: Miami couldn’t be a success if it didn’t inspire such divisive attitudes. Love it or hate it, you can’t argue against the quality.

The A/V club interviews them separately, which is an interesting choice. Parker and Stone understand the dynamics of their partnership well, with Parker being more the creative guy and Stone covering more of the business angle, and they’re quite candid about being creatively stronger when they’re working together. Both of them take a tremendous amount of pride in trying to deliver a good show, and understand that what they do is just a job like any other.

Read the full interview here, or just some choice excerpts after the jump:

AVC: A lot of the humor in South Park feels disgusted and frustrated with the world, like you’re basically asking “Why are people such idiots?” Are you actually emotionally involved in the issues you address with the show?

Matt Stone: Sometimes. But it’s cool, because we get to express our frustration through a little fat kid screaming at the top of his lungs. So it can be taken semi-seriously. We get to enjoy that same distance that the Jon Stewarts of the world get to too. They demand that they be taken seriously, and as soon as someone takes them seriously, they crack a joke. I love the fact that Trey and I have gotten awards for being topical and satirical, but at the end of the day, we are just making jokes. If you ask me how to really solve the health-care crisis, I have fuckin’ no idea, and I don’t want to be a part of it. But I can make a little fat kid yell some emotional truth about it. That’s what we’ve figured out over the years. If you’re gonna make it a TV show, you would never do the actual politics of something, but you would do the emotions behind the politics. Who cares if it’s a right-or-wrong policy—here’s how it makes me feel. You’re not gonna get into a policy discussion with Cartman and Mr. Hankey and Jesus and shit.

AVC: With that all said, do you still enjoy it?

Trey Parker: No. But I’ve never enjoyed it. That’s what’s so funny. People always think that making the show is so much fun. Especially people that don’t know what it’s like to write, and stuff like that. It’s always been totally stressful, totally just wanting to kill yourself every day because you’re under so much stress, and feel like there’s no way you can pull it off, and all of that stuff. And then when it’s over, when the season’s done and you’re proud of what you did, then you totally enjoy it. And when you’re out on the golf course thinking, “Wow, that was a good season,” then you really enjoy it. But coming here to work in the morning, I fucking hate it, and I always have. [Laugh.] Any job is a job. If you have to be doing something, then you’re probably not enjoying it.

You have to like that sentiment – any job, no matter how cool, is still a job. In an industry filled to the rafters with self-important egotists who think they’re curing cancer and changing the world, it’s nice to see that recognized once in a while.

A general rule of thumb is that any time a show has to waste time convincing you to watch, there’s nothing there to see. Currently, prime time game shows are the most shameless examples of this. When a show, such as Fox’s Are You Smarter Than A Fifth Grader? or Don’t Forget The Lyrics whittles down their alloted running time with a minute or two of opening tease and two or more “coming up next” commercial bumpers, it’s happening because the producers don’t have anything more interesting to show you. Or worse yet, the producers know that the first half of their game – the part with questions that a first grader could answer – is spectacularly dull.

What’s worse is that these “coming up” teases are condescending. A recent episode of Fox’s Don’t Forget The Lyrics showed the same shot of a female contestant freaking out at the show’s host twice before it actually happened in the show itself. Sharp eyed viewers can pretty easily deduce what moment in the show the so-called “exciting moment” is extracted from. When a show’s format is set in stone, and you can see the question on the big screen behind the contestant, you know that the game is going to proceed at least as far as that point. That renders every moment en route to there a moot point.

Worst of the lot is NBC’s Deal Or No Deal. Here is a game show that is manufactured suspense minus intelligence. Contestants pick from a randomized set of briefcases, each of which contains a dollar value from $.01 to $1,000,000. When opened, that dollar value is removed from the big board and at periodic intervals, the contestant gets offered a median-biased average of the remaining cases. What this boils down to is a simple game of “pick a number”.

This is a show designed to be watched by parents and young children who want to shout “pick number 12” at the screen, and subsequently feel superior when the on-screen contestant picks number 17 and disaster strikes. In one episode last year, a contestant lost well into six figures of winnings, when, with the mathematical odds strongly against him, he used the rhyme “let’s go with eight, because eight is great!” to guide his decision making.

Eight is great indeed. Too many prime time game shows are populated by struggling actors wearing the milktoast personna of a long-abandoned home town, or they’re true heartland-bred idiots who are willing to blow $200,000 on the advice of a nursery rhyme. It’s an hour long show, so its understood that for the first fifty minutes the same contestant will be staring slack-jawed at some flashing lights, making inane banter with the host, and repeating “no deal” until about 6 minutes before the show is up.

Hell most likely has several outposts on earth. One of them would have to be the editing room where someone is cutting promos for Deal Or No Deal. Any promo producer who has to excite an audience about a prime-time game show, especially the current crop, is dead in the water from the word go. Having to make the inert and repetitive gimmick of Deal Or No Deal seem worth watching on a weekly basis is an impossible task. Just for fun, during NBC’s Sunday Night Football this fall, keep an eye out for these spots each week and think about what it’s trying to sell you. A rube from somewhere east of Los Angeles, Howie Mandel, more screaming, leggy models, and some shocking twist that has to be hidden behind a flashing graphic.

Or, as Public Enemy have so eloquently phrased it: Don’t believe the hype.