I was enjoying it, but from the start of this season something's felt a little off. It had always been balancing out the particularly annoying co-host and the please-think-I'm-interesting-enough-to-be-on-TV antics of the contestants against the actual sport of trying to complete a near-impossible obstacle course. Then the balance tipped in favor of things-that-annoy-Kurt.
The obstacles were always hard, but now they're impossible. ABC decided that viewers simply want to watch people fall down--and that's plenty of fun, but we need to be able to cheer along with successes as well. And the contestants are far-too-often set up for failure.
Then there's the contestants. They have always been obnoxious caricatures of real people, but I started to see why. It was becoming more and more routine for contestants to made it to round 2 to be cut from the show almost entirely. It seems that if you're not acting like, a total nimrod, ABC has no interest in putting you on the air.
What finally put me over was an episode that started out with two minutes of shilling for the new Wipeout video game for the Wii. It was pretty tacky, for one, but I think I was more annoyed at the gameplay footage. It just looked awful--a slow, dull, ugly platformer.
In that very same episode, they started lampooning a science teacher for failing to successfully navigate the "intelligent design" of one of their impossible obstacles, and I didn't even bother finishing the episode. I'd had my limit of lowest-common-denominator entertainment.
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