I Saw This!! realiTyVgames

I Saw This (double exclamation point) is our feature wherein Kent(me) or Toasty attempt to write about a bunch of stuff they watched some time ago and meant to write about but just never got around to doing so. But we can't not write cuz that would be bad, very bad.  Florida governor bad.

One thing we haven't written much about on this blog is realityTV, specifically competition shows.  I know I'm not a huge fan, and I suspect Toasty is similarly averse to the genre.  I think in recent years I've started watching more competition shows than ever, by which I mean, a couple, versus none.  I recall dabbling in early seasons of Survivor and Trading Spaces and American Idol and Project:Runway but at a certain point I realized that these competition shows were just empty calories, and not even all that delicious calories...like eating veggie straws when you could just have had potato chips, or caramel corn, or a fruit salad. I'm feeling peckish and losing the thread here.  In recent years, we've watched all of Nailed It! on Netflix, easily the most entertaining baking competition show out there, because the whole point is bad bakers trying their best, and having fun while doing it.  We've also watched Lego Masters which, given that we're obscenely ridiculous toy people in this household (I'm watching a youtube video about action figure news as I write this), is not that suprising, but I was surprised to find how engaged I was with the show, which is not very much about the personality politics and all about building cool Lego diaramas.

So, we partook in a few other reality competitions in the past couple months... more in such a short time than ever...let's just talk about it....

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LOL Canada - AmazonPrime

I started in on Last One Laughing Canada out of sheer curiosity.  Given that I'm a comedy lover, I wanted to know who from the Canadian comedy scene would wind up on this reality competition show (and would it be funny, or just sad?).  Well, a completely godawful introduction let me know, and, I was quite surprised that I knew everyone involved, save one ( Brandon Ash-Mohammed) and liked pretty much everyone. The crux of the show is putting 10 comedians in a room for 6 hours (edited down to about 3 hours over six episodes) and telling them they can't laugh, or even smile.  The last one left wins a pile of money for charity.  There are rules, but the basics basically is no laughing, no smiling, one warning, then you're out.

The "LOL" formulae was developed from a Japanese game show but now seems to be an Amazon brand which has, currently, 9 different international versions on the streamer, including Australia, German, France, Spain, and India, with a Quebec version forthcoming (surprised there's no US or UK version yet).

With host Jay Baruchel the competing comedians were Drew Barrymore's ex-husband Tom Green, Kim's Convenience co-star Andrew Phung, Whose Line is it Anyways legend Colin Mochrie, Kids in the Hall's Dave Foley, comedian (and ex-pat living in the UK) Mae Martin, "America's Sweetheart" Caroline Rhea, one of my favourite live stand-ups Debra DiGiovanni, The League's Jon Lajoie (whom our dog Taco was named after) and Letterkenny's K. Trevor Wilson joining Ash-Mohammad.

The thing about comedians is a lot of them don't laugh at comedy, they analyze it, they deconstruct it as they see it, like a magician trying understand how another magician's trick works.  A lot of them have a severe poker face.  But the flip side is there's some of those comedians that just love to laugh, so those ones are out almost immediately.

What I wasn't expecting was Tom Green. It's been so long since I have engaged in Green's absurdist shenanigans that I forgot how good he was at that sort of thing.  He got a lot of miles out "delicious cheese sandwiches" (maybe too much mileage). And here he's kind of in his element, just able to be his weird self. Lajoie was easily my favourite competitor, as he had tactics for not laughing, which were tremendously funny on their own.  Mmm. Mmmhmm.  Ash-Mohammad's seductive sunscreen application was something absolutely special to behold, and Mochrie is such a seasoned improv pro that almost everything he does is so good.  Foley seemed to be completely disinterested in the whole thing, even after he was ejected, while Rhea came prepared to laugh, which was kind of the antithesis of the show (rolling out in her teen daughter's wardrobe was a pretty good bit though).

I laughed a lot, and enjoyed spending time with pretty much everyone, and I found the format worked quite well as a competition, really drawing the viewer through from episode to episode, but the unstructured room with hack comedy props is little too malformed for high quality comedy.  The good thing is at 6 sub-1/2 hour episodes it didn't overstay its welcome.

LOL Australia - AmazonPrime 

As I started this post writing about the Canadian version, put the Australian version of Last One Lauging - hosted by Rebel Wilson - on in the background, kind of as an experiment to see if the show would still work even if I didn't know the personalities involved.  I only know a couple of the comedians, mainly host Wilson and absurdist Sam Simmons (who I wrote about here during 2013's JFL42 festival, the one year I deigned to write about stand-up comedy on the blog) but the format proved itself to be just as attractive and entertaining, even if the personalities involved were a bit more alien. 

It's still a fairly funny show, but there's definitely some cultural differences that bubbled up to the fore.  For starters, the Aussies are much more brutal and cutting, like they were treating the room as a place to roast each other, really dig into their careers and, in some ways, let their petty jealousies bubble up to the surface in unflattering ways, that, I guess were meant to be comedy (the thing about roasting is it's only funny if everyone's laughing together, otherwise it just feels mean, and the whole point here is to not laugh, so nobody's laughing).  The Canadians all seemed genuinely respectful of one another, even if they didn't quite know each other.  The elder statesmen, the ones who had gone off to temporarily bigger careers in the States, they were still generally kind to the younger set.  Australia is roughly the same population density as Canada, but where they're situated in the world they're the big English-speaking market (with New Zealand being their Canada), so there's no where to go as an elevation unless you're willing to make the huge leap to the States or UK.  As such it's a tinier, more insular market, everyone knows each other on this show, but there's much more of a competitive spirit between them all.  And throw in $100,000 prize (not for charity, but for the winner) it's certainly a bit more cutthroat.

Another standout in comparison was the Australians' reliance upon dick and bum jokes.  So many bum jokes. I think half the gags here were about bums.  There's got to be some sort of cultural obsession with the ol' hiney Down Under (well, I guess "down under" is basically a butt euphamism as is, so perhaps it makes some sense).  There was quite a bit more lewdness in the Aussie LOL, and maybe an overreliance on cheap theatrics.

It was funny to see that there's a few archetypes that bubble up.  There's the seasoned improv vet, (Mochrie in Canada, Frank Woodley in Australia), the almost-as-seasoned absurdist (Green vs Simmons), the one who distances themselves from it all (Foley vs the almost entirely unengaged Ed Kavalee, making Foley look positively enthusiastic by comparison), the young buck going deep against the vets (Ash-Mohammad vs Nazeem Hussain) and the anti-laugh tactician (LaJoie vs  Dilruk Jayasinha).

Even comparing the hosts, Wilson was much more passive than Baruchel, who seemed to want to insert himself into the happenings as much as possible. The Canadian version also had some games and special guests inserted into the proceedings which made for a bit more entertainment and sense of structure, where there was little else but chaos in Australia.  

But then Sam Simmons was on the attack from moment one in the show, and didn't let up for anything.  My recollection of him as a live performer was that he would do anything, shamelessly, and his sense of comedy crossed the entire spectrum, but here he was mostly focussed on shock-and-awe.  By the end of the show the room looked like a bodega had exploded, like a rock star's hotel room after a coke-fuelled bender, and most of that chaos could be attributed to Simmons.  His go-for-broke, no shame comedy started minutes into the show as he stepped out from behind the change room curtain, music blaring, to perform a wild dance wearing a leather jacked with over a dozen stretchy rubber dick-and-balls stitched on it, which he then proceeded to tug and stretch and fillate in a manic fit along with the hyper music.  And that's where he started his onslaught.

Just past the halfway point, there fell a spastic sense of desperation among the remaining competitors which only seemed to heighten as more were eliminated.  It was less funny and more interesting from a sociological standpoint, as these people who feed off laughs started going absolutely mental, seemingly for hours going "is this funny?" over and over.  That sort of desperation was only flirted with in the Canadian one, but the same sense of "this is a form of torture" seemed to overcome them as well.

I didn't come out of it with a healthier appreciation for the Aussie comedy scene...there was a lot of weaksauce efforts in that room of unfamiliar personalities, but the few standouts really stood out.  Woodley, Simmons, Becky Lucas, and Dilruk Jayasinha I think were tops for me. 

I don't think I'll give any of the other foreign language versions a try.  Comedy is so much in the delivery and the delivery is shot when you're trying to do it through subtitles.

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Best In Miniature - CBC Gem

Another Canadian competition show, though a lot less calmer and gentler than LOL Canada, and much more in the vein of Lego Masters (and I'm sure all those damn baking shows that other people seem to love), where the production cares much less about personalities and backstories, and instead is much more focused on skills.  In this case it's people who create miniatures, dollhouses and accessories.

There is an amazing amount of skill, experience and creativity involved in miniaturing, and the competitors, ranging from only a couple years to decades of experience, each show their own personality in their art.  The competitors hail from the US, Canada, and the U.K., and they seemed to have some form of on-line presence and be largely familiar with one another through social media, some having even bought pieces off the others.

The first episode's challenge is building a dollhouse and it immediately shows the strengths and styles of each of the artists, but also very, very quickly exposes their weaknesses.  Subsequent episodes feature a mini-challenge, where they have to create a small piece in less than an hour, which they are then judged on by the show's experts (one a miniatures expert, the other a design expert), and then they have a specific challenge working in one of their rooms for up to 10 hours.  Each room has to meet some specific design challenges that are foisted upon them, as well as feel a part of the overall aesthetic of the house.

I was impressed, constantly, every episode by everyone, some more than others, but just agog with how cool and amazing and talented these people are at making such a broad spectrum of items.  While some had specialties, most were still able to adapt and create what was needed even if they weren't intimately familiar with the how to.  Plus as the competitors were winnowed down, the more fine and precise the work got, the more impressive it all was.

I enjoyed this show tremendously, very little of which had to do with personalities, except in how they came out in their art.  It was such a low-stakes, low-drama, competition that it was a soothing, relaxing and utterly transfixing watch.  I would like more, but I may also just watch again.

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Is it Cake? - Netflix

Shows based of memes are maybe not the best idea, and Is It Cake? is a fudging mess of a game show.  The format of the show is so bizarre and kind of so antithetical to the way almost any other competition show is done that I have to wonder if it's just ahead of its time, or if it's really just a train wreck.

Hosted by Saturday Night Live's Mikey Day, the premise of the show is three bakers compete in creating a cake that looks like something else, then each cake is put up on a podium against 5 other non-cakes of the same item, and a panel of three "celebrity" (some are minorly famous, some are like specific famous, and some are just internet famous) guests have to come to consensus in 20 seconds on which one is cake.  

But that's just the high level structure...it gets really, really weird the more you dig into it.

The show starts with 9 competitors.  After a round of "Is it cake?", where a variety of random items on podiums - one of them cake - is displayed, and eveyone gets a chance to choose.  If there's a tie, the fastest answer wins.  Kind of a weird system there.  But then, the winner gets to choose two others from the stable.  They each then choose one of the non-cake items for them to replicate in cake form.  The other 6 competitors just go to a bench on the side and...sit there, for 8 hours, while the three competitors bake and make their fake cake.  So bizarre.

AFTER the judging, if the judges were fooled by more than one cake, the judges then have to pick the winner based on how real the cake looks up close and how good the cake tastes.  Then the winner gets a chance to win some prize money by playing "Cake or Cash" where two items looking almost exactly the same are presented, only one is cake, the other is cash.  If they guess which is cake, they win cash.

The following episode, the winner of the previous episode picks two more contestants (from the pool who haven't already been chosen), they play a round of "Is it cake?" with the random items, pick their item to cake fake replicate and go through it all over again.  It's clunky as clunky can be as far as a competition show goes, and yet, it's kinda stupidly entertaining.  It's absurd they have people sitting around for 8 hours while people bake cakes, but that's what happens.  

The contestants, however, are all rather supportive of each other, and all very into discussing techniques, and approaches, and flavours and whatnot.  It's always nice these competition shows where the competitors really are just happy to trade knowledge and appreciate each others' skills.

Likewise, it's fun watching Day's hacking into things that are - and are not - cake.  And the brief moments of deciding whether something is or isn't cake is still a challenge even though you've just watched 20 minutes of the cake being made, the show edits it enough that when it comes time to guess it's still fun for the audience (but it comes at the expense of getting into finer detail on how the cake was made).

Every episode I couldn't believe I was still watching it, and yet, I wanted to watch more after each episode was over.  It's incredibly stupid (and a HUGE waste of food...where does all that cake Day mangles wind up?) and it's such a silly premise, but I enjoyed it despite myself.