I’m a cat person, but I’m still looking forward to this one. Here’s to hoping it skews towards Letterman-ish “stupid pet tricks” and away from treacly stories and formulaic canine steeplechase routines, as those canine competitions are already covered by ESPN 8 (“The Ocho”)* or similar.
Dogs, and the people who dote on them and spend way too much time and money training them and getting them to wear funny little doggy costumes… I’m ready! 
*A funny gag from Dodgeball, The Movie. (“If it’s practically a sport, you’ll find it on The Ocho!”)
I loved the musical chairs! It looked like the smarter dogs, after a couple of rounds, figured out what the rules of the game were. They didn’t wait for their humans to realized the music and had stopped and give them orders, no sir: they lit out for the nearest chair and planted their rumps. Clever, clever doggies.
I think I’m going to enjoy this show.
Hmm. For some stupid reason (like not paying close enough attention to the promos, or the “Greatest” in the name of the show), I had the idea that this show would not be a competitive reality show with a relentless emphasis on producing a single winner, but rather an unstructured, feel-good pastiche of short segments on interesting dogs and their devoted owners – each one naturally of the conviction that his or her pet is the best dog ever.
But if you must have a winnowing reality show with dogs, this is probably the way to do it. The competitive aspect so far has been executed in a physically evenhanded way, with no significant advantage conferred to larger, more powerful breeds (imagine a challenge involving speed or the ability to jump a certain height or distance). The focus on the dogs helped modulate the stereotypical unpleasant personalities on parade that often manifests on such shows. (This was further reinforced in the final, judged segment when one of the judges laid into one dog owner for being, in effect, a narcissistic drama queen.) I was worried that some of the dog owners would take the contest too seriously and be disapproving, dismissive, or emotionally withdrawing towards their pooches, like classic stage parents. Fortunately, the show seems to have selected wisely in this respect; the humans were almost as sociable and decent as their dogs. The judges also injected a dose of perspective and decency into the procedings by criticizing a dog owner for physically manipulating her dog into doing a trick. (I bet we won’t be seeing that in the future with any other dog/owner team.)
Incidentally, how much sleep do dogs require? I was worrying that the dogs were going to stress out from the unfamiliar, stimulating and maybe overdemanding experience of it all, but I was probably worrying too much. (You couldn’t do a show quite like this with cats, because aside from the difficulty of getting cats to do anything remotely like a trick, they like to sleep at least 20 hours a day – with much of their activity reserved for the middle of the night.) OTOH, if dogs required that much sleep, there wouldn’t be any “working” dogs assisting with sheep-herding, drug-sniffing and the like, would there?
And yeah, the doggy musical chairs bit was funny!
I started watching pretty much figuring I’d max out my gag meter but it was pretty funny. Stupid, but pretty funny. Plus the pooches are all kee-ute! On the downside, I felt bad for Ezzie being the first loser. 