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The Next Great American Band judge John Rzeznik.
WHO TAPED AMERICAN BAND? I was curious, but obviously not curious enough to remember to set my TiVo thingie to record The Next Great American Band on Fox last Friday, so I’m forced to reconstruct the show from clips on the show’s website and accounts by other TV critics. Any future viewing will have to overcome my disappointment that the parade of wannabes and odd balls was apparently dispensed with altogether too quickly in the 2-hour debut episode, which got down to the business of narrowing down to the 12 finalists sharpish.
Everyone knows – and ratings have proved – that the first half dozen city-hopping American Idol episodes are among the most watched, and precede a drop off in viewers that only recovers again as the show steams toward its season finale. Since American Band’s producers are the same people who make Idol, they obviously knew this, so one can’t help but speculate that a lack of confidence in the show might be behind the decision to hit the fast forward button and dispense with the parade of losers.
The judges – former Prince percussionist Sheila E, Goo Goo Dolls singer John Rzeznik and Australian Idol judge Ian “Dicko” Dickson – seem altogether more tolerable than Idol’s trio, and the decision to set the first elimination performances on a stage in the Arizona desert, with a view of Lake Las Vegas in the background, to perform under pitiless 100-degree Fahrenheit sun, was something like brilliant, an austere genius that extended to the echo-less, acoustically dead sound mix each band had to overcome to give judges and viewers some sense of their charisma and musicianship.
Overall, there wasn’t a band in the final twelve – from teen metalheads Light Of Doom to swing big band Denver and the Mile High Orchestra – who I’d spend precious coin or bandwidth on, which is another obstacle to overcome if I’m going to remember to set the TiVo next Friday.
THE DYING BEGINS: It’s around now that the first casualties of the fall TV season start getting kicked into the ditch at the side of the road, but according to Tim Goodman of the San Francisco Chronicle, the first two stiffs don’t really count. Fox’s Nashville doesn’t make the dead roll because, well, it was a reality series on Fox, and CW’s Online Nation is an exception because it was a reality show on the CW. “We don’t care,” Goodman writes, “about the cancellation, nor the fact that 98 percent of the country hasn’t heard of Online Nation and 68 percent can’t find the CW on a balloon map of the five networks. (It’s the green one.) Anyway, we count only scripted series as actually being in the game, hence Fox killing off Nashville didn’t count, either. When a network cancels a scripted series – Big Shots, watch your back – we will tell you about it. Nobody cares about Online Nation.” So – ignore the wheeling vultures, people. Nothing to see here.
