Yesterday, I did nothing. I was so intent on doing nothing that I skipped taking a nap, and instead watched more of the mindless crap I DVRed over the last quarter. I was exhausted from the previous day’s festivities which included but was not limited to: riding inflatable dinosaurs, chugging copious amounts of beer, gorging on mustard slathered bratwursts, and getting hit square in the face by a heavy rubber football. If not for the red marks on my face and my now ill-fitting sunglasses, I’d forget the football event all together. Also, I have an enormous blister on the bottom of my big toe that reminds me with every step how truly fucking stupid I can be.
The day of nothing afforded me the opportunity to watch a sickening display of what the ignorant masses watch on the tube all day. Other than So You Think You Can Dance, which is only watchable because of the astounding likeability and talent of the contestants AND the judges, it was a programming desert. (As a side note if Nigel Lythgoe wants to fix American Idol, he’ll have to sit on the panel himself. Fuck it, I’m part of the ignorant mass.) I had the unique pleasure of watching The Voice and immediately regretted it. Mostly it was Carson Daly’s stupid emotionless face/voice/body/personality but Christina Aguilera (who’s strangely overweight) inability to say anything intelligent didn’t help either. Plus, the scoring system for the show seems entirely arbitrary and the singers are talentless and hard to look at, to be nice. (What are the odds that BOTH of the women on Aguilera’s team would be BALD? Seriously? One in twenty thousand? A million? What producer let THAT happen?)
I love Gordon Ramsay. I love his shows. All 800 of them. They’re so much fun to watch because they’re produced SO cheaply it’s like watching B-rate television in primetime. Take “Master Chef,” for instance. What other show so obviously slaps the American public in the face with the old “you’ll watch anything so long as we add dramatic music, an unnecessarily mean British judge, and crush people’s dreams in an hour long Greek-like hazing ritual.” Ramsay has the fucking thing down to a science. The voice-over talent is the same guy he uses for all of his shows; the location for the show is the same as “Hell’s Kitchen”; same forced dramatic commercial breaks right before Ramsay says something unexpected; same hugely underqualified contestants (A show called “Master Chef” that includes a contestant who doesn’t know that carpaccio is not French needs a new name immediately. Incidentally, that contestant is still on the show.) Comparing Ramsay’s “Hell’s Kitchen” (which supposedly includes highly qualified chefs) to Bravo’s “Top Chef” is like comparing Pal-Mal cigarettes to a Cuban cigar. Weird comparison maybe, but watching a Ramsay show is at once as satisfying and sickening as chain smoking an entire pack of those Pal-Mals. And as addictive. The biggest difference between a Ramsay show and any other competition show is that he doesn’t rely on likeability whatsoever. Every single person on the show is unlikeable, from the contestants to the judges. The dancers on SYTYCD are incredibly talented and (some of them) the best in the world at what they do; Ramsay’s contestants are bumbling, arrogant, antagonizing novices at best. The Ramsay show has no heroes. Which if you think about it, becomes something of a social commentary when we (I) watch his shit so much. But, I digress. Me using a Gordon Ramsay show for anything other than my mindless entertainment on a day of nothing would be an even greater travesty than his shows already are.
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