I’ve been pretty curious to see how last night’s premiere of NBC’s I’m a Celebrity Get Me Out of Here was going to work out. This series is wildly popular in the UK, where it’s been running for nine seasons and airs every year in November. I’ve often been in London when it’s on and even though I’m on holiday and should be doing a million things other than watching TV, I get sucked in every time. Most of my friends there watch it—including the ones I always stay with—and so do their kids and, most likely, their parents.
More than half the country tunes in to see this show. All in the name of charity, contestants are forced to camp out in the Australian rainforest for three weeks with few amenities and compete in various challenges to win meals for the camp. Each night the public votes for one cast member to go into the Bush Tucker Trial, which usually involves being submerged in a water tank with snakes or in a pit with creepy crawly bugs and spiders; then they vote again for their favorite celebrity. The one with the least votes is sent home until there is one left standing, who’s named King or Queen of the Jungle.
IACGMOOH UK is silly and sensationalistic and one of the most charming shows I’ve ever seen. A wide array of celebrities are cast to appeal to every age group imaginable—comedians, soap actors, TV and radio hosts, pop singers, retired footballers, models, journalists, producers, politicians, pantomime stars. They’ve had Martina Navratilova, John Lydon (who went predictably apeshit after just a few days and quit) and David Gest (who, shockingly, turned out to be a really funny guy and one of the most popular players that season). There are rows and romances, bickering and breakdowns, but it is curiously fascinating to watch how these people manage to cope in harsh conditions and to see them ultimately bond and band together. It brings out the worst in some people but, more often, it brings out the best.
The show is put together with a light tough that verges on camp, hosted by the cheeky chappies Ant and Dec. It’s sweet. It’s funny. It’s addictive. You tune in every night for three weeks because you get attached to these people, you fall in love with some of them, you really cheer for them to win and you can’t wait to see what they’re going to do next.
An attempt to import IACGMOOH to the US was made in 2003 by ABC, sticking faithfully to the UK format. It was hosted by John Lehr, one of the Geico cavemen. It tanked. Maybe it was the celebrities, like Melissa Rivers and Downtown Julie Brown and Stuttering John Melendez and Chris Judd, who were just too obscure. Maybe it was the three-week nightly commitment. Maybe it was because the reality craze was relatively new and still eyed suspiciously back in 2003. Whatever the reason, the US audience ignored the show.
So I wondered, when I heard NBC was reviving it, what they were going to do differently this time. I hoped it would be something good. But I had my suspicions, and unfortunately they turned out to be right: They’ve made it like every other reality show on TV.
The clichés start with the opening preview-scenes montage. To a generic soundtrack of urgent, heroic orchestral strings and pounding drumbeats—the exact same soundtrack we’ve heard for 10 years now on The Amazing Race, Hell’s Kitchen, Kitchen Nightmares, The Apprentice and Survivor, to name just a few—aerial shots of jungle views are intercut with spiders and writhing snakes and, hey, somebody being swept along by the rapids! Our celebrity cast pops up with the canned soundbites—Heidi Pratt, in her flinty voice, “I don’t know what I’m getting myself into”; Spencer, with his Neanderthal stare, “I’m your worst nightmare”; and then, one by one, all of them—Janice Dickinson, Sanjaya, Lou Diamond Phillips, Franjela, Torrie Wilson, John Salley, Stephen Baldwin, bang-bang-bang in a row, aggressively: “I wanna win”, I wanna win”, “I’m gonna win this thing.” A shot of Spencer wagging his head menacingly and yelling in someone’s face, and the violin shrieks—oh no! Here comes drama and danger and tension and fights: America, look out, this is Big Stuff!
Oh God. This is nothing like the British show. NBC, under producer Ben Silverman’s guidance, has bashed the format into a predictable pulp to make IACGMOOH virtually indistinguishable from every other competition reality show we’ve ever seen. This is what he must believe will get Americans watching: Formula. Familiarity. Something they’ve seen before that they're already comfortable with, like a Slanket. It has worked before, it will work again, and they’ll watch. Yes, they’ll watch.
Except, they didn’t. Well, they did: More viewers tuned in than they did for the 2003 season. But not that many. A rerun of The Big Bang Theory did better, and it was slammed in the second hour by Two and a Half Men and Rules of Engagement. That is hardly an auspicious debut.
It’s not hard to figure out what turned people off. The hosts are complete nobodies: Damien Fahey from MTV and Myleene Klass, a former popstar dolly bird who won the British version of the show three years ago, are bland and boring and utterly reliant on the teleprompter. The setting and format of the show is vintage Survivor, right down to the first bug-eating challenge. The requisite recapping that contestants do on all these reality shows is escalated to a pathological degree, with the action constantly interrupted as we cut to the celebrities repeating everything we’ve just seen and heard in a separate interview-style shot immediately afterward. It’s like instant replay without the replay. At one point the recaps were coming every three seconds—I counted. And then the hosts came back to recap it all again.
I cannot understand the obsession with recapping in US reality shows. Clearly the producers must think the audience needs to have everything spelled out, underlined and flagged all at once, which indicates an innate assumption that the viewers are dumb or distracted or both. Or perhaps incontinent and running back and forth out of the room for bathroom breaks. That’s pretty old thinking in this modern age of Tivo and the DVR, but I will say I didn’t bother to hit pause when I need a bathroom break—I could hear from the next room what was happening as it was repeated again and again. I might as well have been listening to the radio.
So, here’s what happened. We learn a little more about the contestants. Janice Dickinson, who now bears a disturbing resemblance to a burn victim, coyly asserts, “I don’t like these kinds of situations. I don’t like insects,” completely failing to mention that she’s done this before, in the UK version two years ago, and that she came very close to winning. (I watched that season and she was surprisingly likable and resilient and, despite the fact that she grimaced and complained and said, in her death-rattle voice, “Oh maaaan!” every single time a new challenge was announced, the Brits loved her.)
Dead-eyed Heidi makes the profound observation that “it’s kinda like a spa vacation without the spa.” Lou Diamond Phillips announces earnestly, “A lot of people might know me from La Bamba and Young Guns I and II,” his work from 20 years ago. Poor guy. Both Stephen Baldwin and John Salley say that they’re there to “face their fears.” Do they think they’re on Fear Factor? It is 25 minutes into the show before the word charity is even mentioned. Frangela—whom I prefer to call Frangelica—deadpan that “We’re going to raise the bar on the athleticism.” Thank God for Frangelica! So far they’re the only players with a sense of irony. They should be the hosts of this show. We see who that was that got swept up by the rapids: Patti Blagojevich, filling in for her potential felon husband Rod. Janice freaks out, screeching through her ravaged vocal chords, “Pattaaayyyy! Pattaaaayyyyy!” It’s played up for major drama but, of course, it’s no big deal. Patti gets out alive. Next!
Everybody acts surprised by the basic bare-bones campsite. “I was expecting something a little more grandiose,” marvels Baldwin. This series has been running for seven years in Britain, there are clips all over YouTube, yet not one of these people had a clue what they were in for. Ooooh-kay. Heidi is particularly crestfallen, this is not the five-star life she’s used to! She wasn’t expecting this! She’s being deprived of everything she’s ever known and she feels like she’s in prison being treated like Al Quaeda and why are they doing this to her?
For the next hour it becomes The Heidi and Spencer Show. Heidi whines about everything and then instantly recaps all her whining. When she realizes they’re all sleeping together out in the open for the three weeks, she tells Spencer “I cannot not have sex with you for that long.” One of the few joys of The Hills has been that we have never, ever been subjected to any speculation about Heidi and Spencer’s sex life. It was easy—no, preferable—to assume they just didn’t have one. Ech. Not anymore.
Heidi and Spencer are outraged not only by the conditions of the camp but by the low celebrity wattage of their campmates, and decide that no charity is worth this. They walk off the show. Somehow, Spencer finds a phone and calls Ben Silverman directly, telling him, “This cast is devaluing our fame right now.” I don’t buy this act for a minute, mostly because they’re not doing it very well. Heidi and Spencer may be master manipulators, but they’re no actors. Plenty of hubris, zero talent. They’ve clearly come in all pumped up to steal the show—and that pumping up included Heidi’s face and lips; she is looking even scarier than Nicole Kidman right now. They know this act will get attention. It’s no surprise at all when they go back to camp.
They spend the first night—shots of the two of them entwined in a hammock, lying on their backs like corpses, prove that Spencer is, indeed, a mouthbreather—then wake up and walk off again. The rest of the camp call their bluff and split up their possessions, with Torrie mocking Heidi and her dry shampoo spray. Heidi and Spencer come back again and Spencer goes ballistic. Cut to Heidi crying hysterically in an interview about her dry shampoo being defiled, but cut back to the actual scene and she’s blank-faced.
Something’s just not adding up. Even more irritating are continual cuts to Spencer interviewing that he’s doing this on purpose, he’s messing with everyone’s minds, he’s strategizing because it’s all about alliances and “I’m a villain so why wouldn’t I want my brand being negative everywhere?” Spencer seems to think he’s on about three different reality shows at once and he’s getting them all mixed up. And this is where the show, one hour in, has already failed. There is no charm, no subtlety, and zero spontaneity. Just a whole hour of ugly.
It’s a fatal mistake to build the first episode of an ambitious series like this around the two most obnoxious characters. If you want viewers to get engaged, to pick up the phones to vote, to tune in night after night for three weeks, you’ve got to give them something to like. What brings people back to American Idol night after night, season after season? What makes The Amazing Race work? Because they give us people to root for. Not two spoiled, fake-ass villains from a reality show on MTV eating up all the air time.
Some of the other celebs on this show seem delightful. Sanjaya is a sweetheart. So is Salley. Janice is on good form and puts on makeup before going into challenges, Frangelica are hysterical, and Torrie seems game for anything. Nobody gets a chance to know any of them until Hour Two, when we get a few glimmers. Some choice moments: In the gross-food competition, Sanjaya proves he can put anything in his mouth and swallow it; Janice shares that she’s got bronchitis and the menopause; Patti Blago really really really stands behind her husband; Lou Diamond is a good sport, and has great big guns; and Baldwin is bitten twice but a bullet ant but doesn’t complain about it at all.
But it's too little, too late. IACGMOOH leaves off just as the first live Torture Tank challenge gets going, with our celebrities lowered head first into a pit filled with creepy crawlies. I have doubt many viewers will bother to come back tonight to see what happens. Stay tuned.
photos from NBC
UPDATE: This is juicy. TMZ reports that Heidi and Spencer walked off for real after the live segment last night and that the Red Cross, Spencer's charity, have washed their hands of both him and the show.
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