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Ready For Love

2013 in Review: The Worst New Shows of 2013

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2013 was not exactly what we’d call a banner year for the broadcast networks. While buzz continued to center around cable and the ascension of Netflix to a legitimate player in the TV industry, the big four and CW tried desperately to find some comfort food in the form of tepid comedies and stories about serial killers. The end result was a miserable year for the new sitcom and a lot of shows that felt like exact clones of each other showing up. On that note, here’s the worst new shows of 2013.

 

Dishonorable Mention: LA Shrinks (Bravo), Blood and Oil (Discovery), Scrubbing In (MTV)

 

I tried to avoid lumping reality into this list, but these shows each left horrendous tastes in my mouth for different reasons. For Shrinks and Scrubbing In it was the reduction of legitimate medical professionals to glorified sex objects, while for Blood and Oil the combination of ridiculous plotlines and a purely unlikeable central figure in what was intended to be a David and Goliath story completely turned me off. Still, I grade reality on a different curve and to compare this to the dreck in scripted programming is apples and oranges, hence merely a dishonorable mention.

 

5 – Welcome to the Family (NBC)

 

This could have easily been any number of other lousy generic family comedies that NBC was praying would beam into more houses than their critically acclaimed shows, but the tie goes to the one that lasted a meager three episodes before getting yanked for whatever NBC decides to put in the 8:30 slot in a given week to patch the rest of the fall. While the initial concept wasn’t too awful (teen gets knocked up and the two families are forced to come closer together), the combination of unfortunate implications and generally uninspired execution killed this show deader than Welcome to the Family killed my ability to laugh for a half hour.

 

4 – Do No Harm (NBC)

 

Get used to seeing the peacock’s name on this list because we’re not done with Bob Greenblatt’s numerous missteps this year. Do No Harm was an incredibly weak mid-season offering that tried to bring the Jekyll and Hyde drama into a modern setting. However, since Hyde wasn’t that well differentiated from our Jekyll half (or Grey’s Anatomy for that matter) the end result was a boring product that got sent to the Saturday night death slot after two episodes. Even the series ending twist that the more villainous side was our central character’s true nature felt forced and it’s for the best this show saw a quick mercy killing.

 

3 – Cult (CW)

 

Cult gets away with being slightly lower on the list than our next two entries on the basis that it almost enters “so bad it’s good” territory. The weakest of our serial killer crop, Cult relied on wooden acting, a ludicrous script, and an obsession with overly dark camera work that kept the viewer from seeing everything. Sadly, the truly worst conceit the show tried to pull was the notion that a CW show would generate the sort of the viewership and fan obsession that would make directioners look sane, measured, and understated by comparison.

 

2 – Dads (FOX)

How is this show still on the air? Moreover, how on earth did Fox give it a back-order? This show is dreck on every conceivable level. The writing is sloppy and borders on every-ist in the book. This is made even worse by the sloppy execution of the script and the soulless mugging (reminiscent of a bad Jim Carrey impression) of Giovanni Ribisi and Seth Green. What truly makes Dads getting a full 22 inexplicable, however, is the fact that it’s literally dragging down the rest of the FOX comedy block (which is actually pretty good, and in terms of quality might be the strongest of the big four– rivaled only by ABC) in the ratings, meaning that whatever leverage Seth McFarlane has over FOX executives could easily sink Brooklyn Nine-Nine and The Mindy Project as well.

 

1 – Ready For Love (NBC)

 

At the top of this article I mentioned that I tried to lay off the reality genre as much as possible for this article (based on the amount of reality I watched I could easily have made an all reality all-worst). However, Ready For Love tried so desperately to cross three or four different genres of shows, so I’m breaking my own rule for the purposes of this list.

As bad as NBC has been developing comedies this year (they were 0 for 7 last year, and I anticipate another 0 for 3 in the fall), they’ve been equally awful in developing event shows. Million Dollar Quiz, as much as the game show junkie in me enjoyed, slowly devolved into a fiasco, with power outages, bad weather, and bad math (they had to juice the pot by about $300,000 in order to come through on their advertising). However, MDQ had nothing on Ready For Love, which wanted so desperately to mash-up The Bachelor and The Voice. Ready For Love was boring, cliched, a slog (there was definitely not two hours of material for that premiere) and worst of all, for a show about love, it showed precisely zero heart. An unmitigated disaster all around, and not even in a way that you could redeem the show as being cheeky about it’s lousiness, Ready For Love was really the worst new show of 2013.

Next Time: Next Monday we look at the best new shows of the year, as networks scramble to reclaim former glory and cable tries to hold the fort against massive losses in the upcoming year.

Ready for Love Feels Unready for TV

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Ernesto Arguello, Tim Lopez, and Ben Patton, your bachelors on Ready For Love (Source:NBC)
Ernesto Arguello, Tim Lopez, and Ben Patton, your bachelors on Ready For Love (Source:NBC)

Ready for Love: Tuesdays at 9pm Eastern, NBC

The dating show is an interesting specimen that’s evolved with TV over the past half a century. We started with the bubbly dating game show in the Dating Game evolved to the video-dating style of Love Connection and eventually to the reality model of The Bachelor. NBC is banking on the idea that the dating show can move into the American Idol competition age with it’s latest offering.

From executive producer Eva Longoria, Ready For Love is built around matchmakers searching for Mrs. Right for three very eligible bachelors: civil engineer Ernesto Arguello, financier Ben Patton, and Plain White T’s singer Tim Lopez. These men, with the help of their matchmakers, will then try to figure out which (if any) of the twelve lucky bachelorettes will be their perfect soul mate.

Tonight’s episode focuses solely on Tim Lopez (gee, I wonder whom NBC is marketing as the star on this show?) while next week introduces Ernesto and Ben. The show also takes time to introduce it’s matchmakers, including Amber Kelleher (who takes the fairy tale angle), Matt Hussey (focused on the male), and Tracy McMillan (the straight shooter).

Our show begins with Longoria opening with a brief explanation of how the show works, and it’s emphasis on finding the perfect match vs. a casting angle. This then led into a 6 minute-long expository preview video that didn’t give many details as to how this competition works. From there our bachelors must remove three contestants straight off of the bat before they ever lay eyes on their respective suitors. A spanner is immediately thrown in the works as one of the suitor’s in Matt’s pool has a past with Tim. From there we switch to more video packages, where our first set of suitors move into their house and the matchmakers give last second advice before their big first date.

Our second hour kicks off with the girls showing up for their big first group date with Tim, who immediately shows a sense of humor by fake-ratcheting up pressure before putting on a concert for all of the girls. He then has the suitors’ write lyrics to a new song he was working on, which they then sing in groups split up by matchmaker. We also get our first example of gamesmanship, as Leah, the girl from Tim’s past, isolates him for a short period of time, raising the suspicions of our other contestants. After the dating segment, our suitors’ rejoin the matchmakers in the studio, who critique them on their performance in a manner once again not far removed from your standard issue competition show. Each judge then sends one of their “team” up for elimination, with Tim ultimately choosing one to come home. After sparing one of the girls, Tim and the two remaining girls go down to the “garden room” to eliminate one of the girls.

Our hosts Bill and Giuliana Rancic seem passable in that role, but sometimes come off a touch maudlin, as if they were introducing the In memoriam segment of an awards show. It feels very counterproductive, however, that the hosts often work solo, with Giuliana single-handedly emceeing our first hour. Additionally, some of the platitudes felt odd and slightly redundant (at one point Giuliana said “Three of you will be in the bottom three”. In spite of that, Giuliana manages to show incredible efficiency at stoking the fire, making a large issue of the Leah power-play that occurred during the date. Bill, however, seems like complete window dressing, there solely to make the married couple host gimmick work.

Ready for Love seems to borrow liberally from The Voice with the first two episodes being a pretty blatant copy of The Voice’s blind auditions. Additionally, much like it’s lead-in, the show posits our bachelors’ search for love as a competition between the matchmakers (whom also double as our suitors’ coaches). Similarly, all in-studio criticism feels like they are analyzing these girls like its’ a performance art or worse yet some sort of sick experiment in how to get a guy to fall in love with you, which completely counteracts the whole “finding real love vs. the fake love of reality TV” nature of the show that Longoria promised.

This may be the first episode, but the show moves at a glacial pace with large numbers of long and ultimately irrelevant video montages (it’s bumps run a minute plus a clip, and Tim, all three matchmakers and the show itself all receive lengthy video packages). This seems particularly egregious when you consider that each episode runs a way too long two hours and the third set of blind picks were rushed to make room for more irrelevant video montages after devoting two segments a piece to each of the first two batches of contestants. This is made worse when you consider that every major twist is turned into a cliffhanger that leads into a commercial break mid-sentence and that every commercial break is preceded by constant previews of the same 30 seconds of next week.

The show works best once it moves back within the reality paradigm, as it allows the show to play with its’ cast’s personalities (Hailey’s the funny one, Leah is the girl from the past, Christina is the serious one with the Musical Talent). Unfortunately, it is also a slave to many of the genre’s cliches (the three girls who get the most screen time during the date are inevitably your bottom three). This is a shame, as less of the time is focused on building the relationships than the gimmicky and half baked in-studio segments.

The Final Verdict: It’s bloated, it’s exposition is in all of the wrong places, and it starts throwing in twists before it can even establish a format. In a lot of ways Ready for Love is a hot mess that wants to have its’ cake of being a Bachelor clone, while also eating from the ratings cake of its’ Voice lead-in. Any ethical concerns aside about love being a competition, the show suffers from terrible pacing that bogs down any action. Would it have really killed the producers to eschew that opening 10 minutes and half of the bumps for a full third blind audition segment and/or to introduce us to the rest of Tim’s suitors in the date segment? Skip this one, it doesn’t do romance any favors and there are better ways to spend two hours of your Tuesday night.