The last few years the peacock network has looked more like the ostrich network - working with their heads in the sand. Bam! Zing! I'll be here all week, folks!
With material like that, I should have auditioned for the NBC summer reality show, "Last Comic Standing!" This season, the show has it's third host - "Where are they now" alumni Bill Bellamy! Who, let it be known, is quite an improvement over last season's snoozefest of a host Anthony Clark.
Yo! MTV's Crap.
In what is considered the fifth season of the show (that third season was really a big nothing, though), former LCS contestants Ant, Alonzo Bodden, and Kathleen Madigan travel the globe to search for the newest Last Comic Standing! Which really just means we have to listen to half a dozen foreign comics do routines that will have references to shit we don't get. In other words - They aint winning.
When "Last Comic Standing" premiered in the summer of 2003, the show was an interesting hybrid (aka "rip off") of "American Idol," "Big Brother," and "Survivor." There was an audition process ("American Idol") where comics were selected to live together in a house ("Big Brother"), and then compete in challenges ("Survivor") that would ultimately result in two comics going head to head in an elimination performance. Well all that changed after NBC screwed up the franchise by forcing a ridiculous third season onto the fall schedule in 2004. The show was absent in the summer of 2005, but returned last summer in the form of a revamped and much less interesting program.
Now we just see a series of comics audition. Week after week, episode after episode. The judges pick their favorites, then they perform in front of a larger audience until "America gets to vote." Boooring!
The only explanation I can think of for NBC changing the format is that they thought viewers were not interested in the "Big Brother" aspect of the show. (The real reason, I suspect, is that NBC was too friggen cheap to rent a house in the Hollywood hills for a month.) But as usual these days, NBC was wrong. In my opinion, the only one that matters of course, the best part of "Last Comic Standing" was the "I think I'm funnier than..." showdown. It resulted in a real test of comic ability, and made for some interesting tension inside the house. But really, at the end of the day, I guess it doesn't even matter. Does anybody remember any of the previous comics? Are any of you rushing out to see the Dat Phan show? I thought not.
With all that said, while LCS aint what it used to be, it's still better than most of the crap these networks subject us to during the summer. So there's that.
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