It’s in its second week now and I’m trying to decide if I like this show. The premise itself is kind of neat. Take a bunch of sharpshooters and throw every type of weapon at them and see who fares the best.
The problems come in the implementation and decisions of the producers.
First, there are 16 people which is a heck of a lot for any reality show, let alone the first season of one. History channel must have had some confidence (or nothing else on) to give them a full 16 episodes.
Second, the contestants are divided into two teams and the losing team must nominate two players to go to the elimination round. Proper strategy would say you pick your fiercest competitors to get rid of but after two episodes it appears as if people are picking the ones that screwed up the most on the previous round. Admittedly this isn’t so much a problem with the producers, except for the fact that they created this type of elimination.
Third, they spend way too long on the elimination. From the two episodes I’ve thus far seen, it’s been divided into 1/4 setup 1/4 competition round and 1/2 elimination round. That’s a long time to focus solely on the losers. I liken it to Last Restaurant Standing who had a weird choice for the first few seasons of having one challenge, and then sending the three last place teams into a second challenge to see who would get kicked off. Not only did it focus our attention on the people who did badly, but it basically gave the “losers” who weren’t kicked off extra prep time in the form of additional challenges to practice and strengthen their skills.
Fourth, as someone who isn’t that familiar with weapons, I don’t feel that I’m learning all that much about them or what makes them unique while watching this show.
When I first started seeing commercials for this I was very interested in seeing it, because I like displays of marksmanship. There’s a two-hour show that History Channel runs every so often with various people demonstrating trick shots which I always found entertaining, and I thought this would be an extended version of this, particularly since it said that each of the sixteen would be expected to demonstrate skill with various weapons, not just the ones they were trained in.
Then I watched the first show, and found out that it wasn’t a real contest, but a reality show. I hate reality shows; I don’t want to see all that interpersonal relationship crap, with clips of people talking about how X isn’t a team player, or how Y needs to learn to accept criticism. To me the elimination round stuff is particularly stupid; someone is being eliminated because they aren’t that good a pistol shooter, when they may be a skilled archer, which would make them valuable in next week’s show.
When I watched this week’s show I just fast-forwarded through everything but the actual competitions, which is probably what I’ll kep doing unless I lose interest in the show entirely.
I dunno, I like the idea that instead of the whole reality show trash crap of voting off the strongest competitors, they’re actually (so far) voting off the people who fail the challenges. At least from what little I’ve seen of it.
But in general, I agree with the idea that the History Channel should NOT be doing a reality show.
I like the idea of this show.
However like all reality shows (and now game shows), they drag it on too long.
They show the shot too many times; they have too much time filler like making us watch everybody walk slowly into their various headquarters.
My side comment about game shows is the same complaint. They try to manufacture drama, when there just isn’t any. Of course the worst offender is the guessing suitcase game with Howie Mandel. YOU’RE GUESS NUMBERS, JUST HURRY UP WILL YOU?!?!?!?!
I watched an episode of Are You Smarter Than a Fifth Grader the other day. OMG! Could they drag it on any slower? If you counted the total number of questions for the entire show, I’d be surprised if it’s more than 20. The same thing with Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? Do I really need to hear your stupid monologue about why you don’t think it’s answer A?
Now compare that to Jeopardy or even Wheel of Fortune… Those are game shows worth watching. Proven by the fact of how long they’ve been on television.
They are going to bow and arrow next week. That seems a crummy way to eliminate a sharpshooter. How can you expect a rifle or gun expert to be familiar with bows and arrows too?
i mean, 2 weeks in and they’ve done rifles and pistols and there are still what, 14 contestants left? by week 12 it could very well come down to flipping playing cards into a hat.
also, +1 for kelly. he seems to be the most normal, and legitimately a good shot. the way he blew that bald marine out in the elimination challenge was superimpressive.
Yeah, I still think 16 contestants for the first season was just way too many. And with three weeks through (I haven’t yet seen tonight’s), they’re investing way too much time and effort on the two losers and not nearly enough on the actual competition.
Take last week’s episode. Bows. The episode broke down to roughly
5 minutes of intro
10 minutes of that dispute between Kelly and Bill.
20 minutes elimination round
5 minutes actual competition between the two teams.
Way to breeze right through half the contestants.
And the choice on the competition itself is also weird. It’s a TEAM event, right? So why have only the closest shot on each team count and the rest be completely irrelevant? I mean, all 5 other players on the blue team could have literally said “eff this, I’m sitting this one out” and they’d still have won!
Why not instead score up points like you would in any other archery competition and see what TEAM gets the highest score? Or have that be just one of several groups of games played?
I just think the producers are making some bad choices in how this whole thing is structured.
What did Kelly even say to Bill that pissed him off so badly?
God I hate what reality tv has done to competitions. This is a decent enough idea for a competition shows. All the drama is boring.
This show makes me wonder how good the contestants are. No one has displayed any exceptional skills of marksmanship, except Kelly who hit the 400 and 600 yard targets on the first episode pretty well. The first competition with the historical military rifles was pathetic, with the supposed marksman missing what appeared to be maybe an 8 inch circle at 50 and 100 yards over and over again with rifles that any half decent shot could hit them with easily. I don’t know if they gave them defective rifles or if they weren’t sighted correctly or if they’re all just bad shooters, but those were not at all hard shots and yet they failed repeatedly.
I’ll look up the comment, but it was something to the effect of Bill telling Kelly that his ex-wife committed suicide and Kelly responding with “wow, was she really that bad?”
I’m not sure if that was it exactly because even that doesn’t make too much sense. But I think it’s close.
Anyway, I read on another message board a fantastic idea for this show: no teams, no eliminations. Get, say, 8-10 competitors. Do 8-10 (or heck, 14-16 if you want) shows. Each show is a round and each round gets you points.
Person with the highest total after all the rounds? Crown him or her Top Shot.
tada.
Ok, it was his ex-wife’s fiance who shot himself in the chest. Kelly then said “wow, was she really that bad?” to which he then apologized and attempted to make amends for twice during that same day.
That bothered me too. If you’re going to have teams, then the winning team should be chosen on the basis of a total team score, not on the best individual “score”. Which is what they did this week, I noticed. Each shooter got one point for hitting an enemy target and lost a point for hitting a friendly target, and the team score was the sum of the individual scores.
At least I’m not investing a lot of time in this show. By fast-forwarding through the drama and commercials I’m done in about half an hour.
The thing that made no sense to me was that they told the shooters that they had to shoot as many arrows as they could in 30 seconds, but then said only the arrow closest to the bullseye won. There was no reason to rush your shots, they didn’t score each arrow. They should’ve done a cumulative score thing, where you got points for where each arrow hit. If you fired more arrows, even if they were farther away, you could win if your overall score was higher. So if you loosed 7 arrows, and got 3 1’s and 2 2’s, you’d win over someone who fired 3 arrows and got a 3 (center circle), a 2 and a 1.
Like everyone else, I like the idea of this show, it’s just poorly executed. This weeks challenge was much more interesting…both the team challenge, and the elimination challenge. Although I really do wish they’d spend more time on the shooting…I think they were done with the team challenge by minute 24! Still, I DVR it, so I just fast forward until someone is shooting a weapon.
I too liked this week’s episode. Really played up the team aspect, while still being an interesting challenge. Still too much time on the elimination, but it was ok.
Also, it was the first week where I really got a sense of the strategy being implemented. There’s a push pull on optimal strategy here. On the one hand, you want to win (obviously). That means that if you have the chance to send your strongest competitors to get eliminated, you do it.
On the other hand, if your team wins, you don’t face elimination at all. That means you want the strongest team you can to keep yourself in the running.
Could they not get any actually skilled shooters for this show for some reason? I am amazed every week at how bad the guys on this show are. I mentioned in a previous post that Kelly seemed like an actual skilled shooter because he hit a relatively small target at 600 yards with a moderate crosswind in two shots, but when he was doing the shooting the plates AR-15 thing from maybe 20 yards in the practice session he missed half his shots.
I could do the practice drill faster than any of the people they showed with nearly 100% accuracy (and obviously 100% accuracy if I wasn’t going for speed - since it’s a trivial shot). I’m not bragging - lots of recreational shooting enthusiasts would find it very easy. I don’t even shoot more than a few hundred rounds in a typical year. I could post on ar15.com and get 20 shooters better than anyone on this show in about 20 minutes.
They also seem so specialized as to be incompetant in other disciplines, which is weird to me. Every recreational shooter I know can shoot big old bolt action heavy rifles, intermediate rifles, pistols, and shotguns - they’re not really that different. But on this show everyone seems to say “I’m a ____ shooter, I have no idea how to handle a _____!” With the longbows this makes sense because that’s a completely different thing, but who the hell is a competitive pistol marksman or long range rifle shooter and then gets baffled when handed an ar-15?
The challenge setup was also pretty stupid. They were talking about friend/foe judgement and how it can be hard to determine your targets under pressure, but the challenges they set up for this was just shooting different color targets - no judgement there, you’re told a color and you shoot it. Even the actual challenge was just a minor memory challenge rather than any sort of judgement. If they wanted to do judgement, they could’ve done standard pop up targets with combatant/non-combatant targets and made them cycle quickly.
Bah, I really want to like a show with this premise but I find massively stupid stuff about the show constantly.
