No, I spent four seasons ignoring that Dean Cain was supposed to be Superman. But not ignoring Teri Hatcher. I am only a man, after all.
If his wife was almost VP and his daughter and her sperm donor ex-non-husband are stars, Todd is Harrison-fucking-Ford.
All right, finally saw the whole thing (mostly…forgot to record and lost the first 23 minutes, no biggie).
Reiterate what I said about the platitudes getting old unbelievably quickly. The worst part is, it’s the same damn thing every time. I really hope that they got it out of their system and can just compete now.
Other than that, it’s a great contest. You can really see all the elements they talk about all the time: the hardship, the danger, the camaraderie, the tension, the incredible difficulty. (One of my favorite quotes: “War is not graceful.”) Fighting for every inch, driven to the breaking point, that’s a level of intensity not even The Amazing Race has. And what the heck, I, like any other red-blooded American, am a sucker for stuff getting blowed up real good.
One thing I’m really interested in seeing is who’s going to get run down by the week-to-week demands of the contest. We’ve seen promising contestants on American Idol and Dancing With The Stars run out of gas, but I’m expecting contestants to hit the wall a lot sooner here…and a lot more dramatically. I wouldn’t be surprised if at Todd Palin just couldn’t go on as early as week two.
Not sure what Desmond Tutu’s problem is. Isn’t there enough to criticize about our actual military misadventures without having to drag a reality show into it?
Loach - I’d be interested to read some of those comments, so long as it’s not the usual tired cavalcade of “Ooh, this is soooo unrealistic!” That ship sailed about the third episode of Survivor.
The thing about this show is that the “stars” are all talking about how real this is. Not. It’s not real until you know there isn’t going to be a production team to haul your ass out of the water because you can’t swim. It isn’t real when the “gunfire” on your landing is squibs. You may be firing live ammo, but that doesn’t make it real.
StG
There once was a General named Clark
Whose candidacy wasn’t a lark
But his coffin is now nailed in
He’s just another Sarah Palin
Sir, your career has just jumped the shark.
2nd episode was pretty good. Say what you will about the special effects and squibs, the fear is very real.
Pleasantly surprised by how Todd Palin turned out, and he actually looked like a strong contender today. I think the fact that’s he’s largely a nobody is actually a plus, as he came in with no pretensions and is willing to work hard. Don’t know offhand what “Iron Dog” is (I’m assuming some kind of sledding race), but an outdoorsman background is a definite plus here.
Something I’d like to see in the future is return fire…lasers or rubber bullets or whatever…and penalties for getting hit. Since this is supposed to be at least kinda what combat would be like, this would add an element of risk and require skills like taking cover and moving stealthily. It’d be interesting to see how an ace shooter fares under unfavorable conditions.
Two go out next week? Hmm, seems like NBC is still in the “testing the waters” phase. Hope this catches on in some form. Right now it’s way better than American Idol.
Desmond can kiss my tutu.
I think the show’s pretty interesting in concept, but the execution could use a little work. Seeing the same mission over and over gets a bit repetitive. Also, disappointing that the shootout at the end wasn’t even changed between episodes.
Still, I’d rather watch this than the aborted Fear Factor revival it more or less replaced. And I say that as a long time Fear Factor watcher.
Real military training does use the laser hit system so yes, I would agree that would be a good element to incorporate in an episode with tests specifically about cover/movement.
Just finished this week’s episode. Pretty mundane, all things considering, but I guess it’s really just a buildup to the final. Wow, it’s ending already? Next week is the two-hour finale, and by my count there are still five contestants left. (The “double elimination” never happened, dunno why.)
Anyone else notice that the chevrons are pointed in the wrong direction? I guess that’s part of why they can’t earn too many stripes; there’s no place to put the arches!
Starting to sour on this a bit. More than anything, I’m having trouble understanding the whole point. If it’s to show how awesome our armed forces are, well, I’m sorry, but there’s no separating the troops from the mission, and it’s a sad reality that very few of our wars could be considered just (not to mention for the ones that were just, we had a lot of help). Furthermore, we haven’t had a legitimate defensive war since 1812 (except for the Pacific during WW2, and I’m not even sure that should count). War is a sordid, ugly, tragic business, and no number of high-tech target shoots will change that. I really think the show should drop the pretense and adopt a Hollywood action movie theme. We could still have gunplay, and could throw in things like leaps and tumbles and falls off of roofs and the always-entertaining dive from the fireball. Stuff blowing up is well and good, but let’s not forget the physical side.
Ah well. Not that much of a time commitment. I’ll catch the final.
Whoa…almost can’t believe it took me so long to get back to this. Well, anyway, belated wrap-up:
Like I mentioned before, it’s always cool watching stuff blow up, and helping our veterans is always a worthy cause, and it didn’t drag on too long, but…overall, something of a disappointment.
Well, first off, the fact that sizable but not extraordinary amounts are going to charity only brings up the issue of how much they’re spending on this show. And since it is ostensibly at least kinda based on combat, that means the unrealism issue is simply unavoidable. My big problem was all the white space. Man, Wipeout isn’t this talky. And we hardly hear anything of substance. A mature discussion of the purpose of our armed forces and how it’s evolved over the decades would’ve been a nice change of pace from the endless platitudes that got tiresome in the first half hour. I can’t even tell you who won, it was so tedious.
Make it a Hollywood action star challenge, make the assignments more varied and longer, and less talk. And take out the operatives; this isn’t the Pebble Beach pro-am. Then this has a future.
P.S.: Anyone watch Boot Camp? From what I heard, it didn’t make much sense, and the stuff the DIs did was just plain weird.
I just finally watched the first couple episodes of this and one thing that jumped out at me was Brent Gleeson, the OP for Pikabo Street looks exactly like Alex O’Loughlin. My husbands comment when seeing him was “isn’t he too big of a star for this”