Thursday, January 20, 2005

WICKEDLY FLAWED: CBS's new Who Wants To Be The Next Martha? is four-fifths of a great show: great concept, solid competitors, wonderful projects and judges who do a good job of explaining the criteria at stake. Up until about 8:45pm, it's terrific entertainment.

But then comes elimination time, and the show falls apart.

The way the show works is that the members of the team which does worse in that week's group competition are at risk for elimination. But the determination of which two team members are on the chopping block is based on which have produced the worst "individual projects", a minor part of the competition which takes up about a minute of the viewing time until that moment. It'd be the equivalent of making American Idol eliminations on the basis of who did the worst Ford Focus promo.

And then it gets worse: because the decision of who actually gets eliminated isn't up to the judges, but to the remaining members of that person's team. Unlike every single other Who Wants To Be The Next Pop Singer/Business Tycoon/Top Model/Fashionista, this isn't subject to the merits but to intrateam strategery. There's every incentive to eliminate the best member of your team as opposed to the worst, in order to eliminate future threats to individual supremacy.

This unnecessary Survior-esque scheme not only will make for worse projects later on during the show, but ensures that the winner will come out of the middle of the pack, and not the top -- which, considering that the winner gets six appearances on The Early Show, a book deal with Simon & Schuster and a development deal for a syndicated series with King World, has got to make all those synergistic entities upset that they won't be promoting the best the show had to offer, but rather a mediocrity who wasn't seen as a sufficient threat.

And tonight proved it, because the woman who was eliminated was undoubtedly the most talented that the show had to offer, both great at her craft and quite charismatic and comfortable in front of the camera. But by botching the structure of the show, they blew it.

And who's the they? LMNO Productions, who previously brought to you such quality programming as The Littlest Groom, Boot Camp and Man v. Beast, yes, the show where a sprinter raced a giraffe and a zebra followed by a group of midgets trying to tow a jet plane faster than an elephant. Go figure they'd screw this up too.

Anyone else watching?

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