NBC television has a summer show called Last Comic Standing: The Search For The Funniest Person In America which is anything but what it claims to be.
The premise of the show is to do for comedy what American Idol does for boring pop music: line up some credible contestants and have them go head-to-head through a series of elimination rounds until the people of America choose a winner. Only the show is rigged.
This week’s two episodes were supposed to winnow a field of 20 down to the 10 who will live in house together while they compete for the top spot. The 20 semi-finalists competed in Las Vegas before a panel of 4 celebrity judges who believed, and had every right to believe, that they would make the final selections. But before the first joke was cracked, one of the funniest comics – Jim Norton – was kicked off the show and replaced with a last-minute stand-in by the show’s producers, who were allegedly concerned about contractual conflicts. Norton appears on Tough Crowd with Colin Quinn on Comedy Central (the funniest show in TV right now) and I suspect that the producers didn’t want Norton ragging on them as he came to understand the show’s real dynamics.
Then the judges were outraged when the funniest comic of the 20, by far, was not included in the final selection despite the fact that they’d all voted for him and the audience gave him a standing ovation. This screwed comic – Dan Naturman – apparently didn’t fit in a demographic quota pre-selected by the producers for a gay man, but some lame-o who calls himself “Ant” did.
The judges aren’t going to let the controversy die. Drew Carey said it best:
?I thought it was crooked and dishonest,? Carey, star of the ABC sitcom The Drew Carey Show, told entertainment trade paper The Hollywood Reporter.
And Brett Butler backs him up:
Butler, via her official Website, groused: “As panel judges, we can say that (a) we were both surprised and disappointed at the results and (b) we had NOTHING to do with them.”
NBC has a message board for discussion of the show, but it’s fully moderated and they censored a post of mine critical of their deception; I called it “a fraud of Michael Moore proportions.”
This is one TV show I won’t be watching this summer, and the whole episode illustrates why sitcoms are dead and the networks are dying. The people who run the networks may as well be replaced by computers programmed with Nielsen’s and demographic data; they have no sense of what’s funny to normal viewers, which is why they’ve been trying to stuff a steady diet of Will and Grace down our throats.
Now that we have Netflix and the Internet can somebody please remind me of what we need the Big 3 networks for? Not for the comedy, and certainly not for the news.
RIP, NBC.
UPDATE: NBC has shut down their message board without comment; no new posts approved since Wednesday night.
ANOTHER UPDATE: NBC has re-opened the message board after sanitizing posts and attempting to block all access – even reading – from infidels like me. Their technical acument is no better than their honesty, so I unblocked myself in about 15 seconds by removing their “bb” cookies. There’s a lot of complaining in the small number of posts they’ve accepted, but nobody is allowed to point out the contradiction between “good dynamics in the house” and “the search for the funniest person in America.”
What a sad little network.