American Inventor Not Very Inventive
NOT an impressive first showing for the new Thursday night series by Simon Cowell. Pretty disappointing.
Part of the draw for early episodes of American Idol is watching the dreck and freaks of talentless contestants try to make their way through the judging process and get roasted back into reality by Simon and Company. You occasionally get rewarded by being surprised by the few who demonstrate actual talent. Not so with American Inventor. It was a parade of practically useless paraphernalia. Most of the inventors didn’t even seem to have a real reason to have created their product in the first place.
I don’t think I would have let ANY of them pass to the next round. I can only imagine that fear began to set in to the producers’ minds that there wouldn’t BE a next round if a few people didn’t make it through the gauntlet.
It seemed the best way to assure yourself of at least one vote was to tell a story that could get Mary Lou Quinlan to cry… of course, getting HER vote almost guaranteed you’d lose Doug Hall’s. Their on-air relationship makes the one between Simon and Paula look like Ward and June.
Bad TV shows will always be with us, but there’s a greater problem to consider… If the ideas presented on that show truly were the most inventive concepts that American minds have to offer, we are in TROUBLE.
By way of rebuttle — here’s a quote from Doug Hall’s website:
“As I told the Inventor Group in San Francisco – real inventors are going to HATE this show. Then again – that’s probably good because if it was a real inventor show – it would be boring TV – it would be Geek TV and maybe 12 people would watch it.
I think what you’re going to see is BIG TIME REALITY TV – amplified emotions, hyped drama — all that stuff that makes for a very successful TV show, AND AS SUCH IT’S GOING TO MAKE ROCK STARS OUT OF
EVERY INVENTOR ON EARTH.”
Well… okay. Maybe I’ll stick around to watch episode two.
