“A hardcore cop who’s a total control freak.” WHOAAAA!!!!

But even crazier, he’s a single dad with a precociously sassy adult-acting daughter with wisecracks!

A longer promo:

“Ray Castle is the bad boy of bestsellers?” Did they seriously just say that without a hint of irony or self-mocking?

I have a crazy notion. I think maybe the two lead characters are going to be total opposites: an uptight control freak who does things by the book, and a wild and crazy wisecracking rake, yet despite their differences they’re going to find…opposites attract! I haven’t seen anything this revolutionary since the show “Bones!”

Seriously, what the fuck? Did ABC commission some screenwriters to just cram as many cliches into a show as humanly possible? Looks like crap. Someone should be punched in the cock full force for inflicting that on the world.

I know a lot of people love reading about TV on Television Without Pity, but for my money no one writes more insightfully about TV than television critic Alan Sepinwall. A friend of mine told me about him back when he was doing day-after Sopranos recaps for the Newark Star-Ledger, and warned me that no matter how well I thought I dissected an episode, Sepinwall would examine and tear it apart in ways that would boggle my mind and make me feel painfully inadequate. And he was right. You’ll never realize what a lazy viewer you are until you read Sepinwall’s review of something you also watched.

Anyway, at his blog he’s been having regular updates on the Wire (and other shows that I don’t watch), and he’s really increased my appreciation for the show immeasurably, which is no mean feat because I already thought it was the best show ever made.

Here’s his analysis of The Wire finale. If you’ve read anything better out there on The Wire not written by David Simon or Edward Burns themselves, which I doubt, please let me know. My favorite part was his take on why Michael’s eventual fate made perfect sense (I initially wasn’t that sold on it). Also of interest from Sepinwall, a Q&A with David Simon.

Lawdy am I gonna miss that fucking show.

As a guy who’s into human nature and the raw, unfiltered truth, this show will be like crack to me if done right. I love the tagline too: “Controversy comes to Fox!” When does controversy ever fucking leave Fox?

Here are some previews:

My wife feels like the contestants are being expoited and embarassed. But my take on it, if these people know the premise and are willing to sell their dignity for some cash and fame, then they deserve to be made uncomfortable for our entertainment.Show premieres on January 23. Thoughts?

UPDATED: Desiree in the comments section left this gem:

I read somewhere that they had a show very similar to this in another country. I want to say somewhere in South America, but it could?ve been Europe?whatever that is unimportant. The impotant part was that they had to cancel the show when a woman confessed she paid someone to try and kill her husband. Now THAT is gangsta.

It sounded so crazy that I thought it had to be an urban legend. I did a little google checking and lo and behold that craziness really did happen! Check it out:

The hit Colombia TV game show, in which contestants submitting to a lie-detector test must truthfully answer 21 increasingly invasive questions to win US$50,000 (?35,000), has been canceled by Caracol Television after a contestant admitted on air to hiring a hit man to kill her husband. Tuesday was the show’s final day.

However a U.S version called “Moment of the Truth” is expected to be launched on the Fox network in the coming months along with spin-offs in England, Australia, Germany, Italy and Spain, according to Howard Schultz, the Los Angeles-based creator of the show.

If anyone can track down the Youtube for this, please pass it along.

I’m not always good at picking who’ll win, but I can usually tell at least one type of singer who’ll always lose, and that would be the dominating strong starters. Whenever people start incredibly strong early on in the auditions, whether it’s Paris Bennett or Melinda Doolittle or whoever, they’re usually doomed to lose. The people who usually win Idol or any reality competition show for that matter are usually the ones who started off under the radar and consistently gave the impression of improvement. And the people who dominated or were frontrunners from the start usually don’t win.

I think it has something to do with how our senses work. See, our senses aren’t geared toward noticing objects, smells and temperature. They’re geared toward noticing changes and contrast in objects, smells and temperature. It’s a subtle but important difference. The more the external stimuli change, the more our senses pick them up. For example, have you ever noticed that if you are sitting in a room, you don’t notice a certain smell? Yet if you leave the room and come back in, suddenly the smell is suddenly obvious? Same with temperature. If you just walk into a room, you’re more sensitive to the temperature because it’s a big change from the temperature outside, but once you’re in the same room long enough you notice the temperature less. With sound, we’re picking up vibrations, or movements in the air. Even when we’re watching still objects, what’s actually happening is that your eye is vibrating across the image. That’s right, our eyes are constantly vibrating on a minute level that we can’t notice, and this vibrating movement is what helps us see still objects. To illustrate this, there’s actually a laser projector that can project images onto an eyeball while tracking and matching the eyeball’s vibration. And what happens is that your eye only see the images for a split second and then they disappear. Color doesn’t exist by itself even. What we see as color is created by contrasting relationships – what the color is next to, what surrounds it. Fixed colors don’t exist. In a different context they will be changed completely.

As a survival mechanism, it makes sense for us to be more aware of things that are changing than things that are remaining the same. Paying extra attention to the changes in your environment lets you know when danger is afoot. At one point in human history there may have been human beings who gave static conditions the same importance as changing conditions, and if so, they’d have ended up weeded out of the gene pool. A new predator could have entered their field of vision and started moving toward them, and they wouldn’t pay extra attention to them. The smell of toxic chemicals could have entered a room and they wouldn’t have given it the exact same importance as the smell already in the room. Natural selection would have weeded them out. The fact that our senses register changes in conditions more than they register static conditions was an important survival tool that allowed our ancestors to survive and reproduce. We wouldn’t be here today if our ancestors’ senses didn’t work this way.

To our bodies, if a condition exists in our environment, remains there over time and still hasn’t injured or killed us, it starts getting categorized as safe. By categorizing it as safe and ignoring it to a degree, this frees up our senses to focus on new elements that enter our environment or changes that happen around us, the things we have not categorized as safe yet.

Here’s another way to illustrate it if you don’t believe me. Say I show you a pair of shoes, describe the brand, materials and craftsmanship and tell you the cost is $100. Then I tell you they were originally $700 last week. That $100 shoe would register as a great value. Now say I gave you the same description of the shoes, down to the brand, materials and craftsmanship, and told you the cost was $100, but I told you instead that the original price was $50. Now you’d feel like you were getting ripped off. Same shoe, same quality, same price, but you can’t judge it in a vacuum, you can only judge it in contrast to something else. How many times have you bought something at a price you normally wouldn’t just because it was a huge drop in price? Advertisers and retail people call this the contrast principle.

Or imagine two sibling students. One gets straight As. The other gets straight Fs. One day the A student comes home with her usual A, while the F student comes how with a surprising C for once. The A student has the higher grade, an A, but the F student’s latest grade will register more strongly and be more noticeable because it’s a greater change. This is unfair to the A student, because given that she’s already at the top, how much more can she improve? Maybe get an A+? That’s about it. It’s all about change, change, change, and when you start off with perfection, the only change you have available to you is downward change. So those are your two choices when you’re perfect: stay perfect and get taken for granted, or change in the downward direction and have it register negatively with people.

Despite thousands of years of technological and societal advancement, our senses still work the same way as they ever did. And that goes a long way to explaining why top performers don’t win American Idol. When we first see them, they overload our senses. We go right from seeing a mediocre applicant and low-key moments to incredibly powerful vocal. Our senses are incredibly stimulated. Week after week of that brilliance, our senses categorize it as “safe” and become less responsive to it. Since the room for improvement is so small, the only option they have to register as strongly with our senses is a drastic drop in quality, except that will register in a negative way, which further defeats the purpose of winning.

And this is why I actually cringe when an American Idol contestant knocks it out of the park too strongly during the audition phase. The judges will gush at first, rave, make a huge deal, and then their senses adjust to it and it all becomes a little less impressive each time. They start criticizing them for not improving as much as the other people (which is unfair because it’s harder to improve on excellence than it is to improve on mediocre or average). The audience starts takes their greatness for granted and votes for the improving underdogs instead. In every season of American Idol that I’ve seen (I haven’t seen many), it’s never the early leader that wins the whole shebang. It’s the biggest improver. Because as I described, we’re programmed to primarily notice change, and it’s harder for excellence to change in a positive direction. Even Kelly Clarkson, the most successful Idol to date, did not dominate right away. She was considered underwhelming by the judges at first and improved a lot every week.

So when I finally get around to watching Idol on my DVR, and I see the knockout supertalent that gets pegged early on to win the whole thing, I know they’ll end up losing eventually. As unfair as it seems, overachieving and early excellence don’t always pay off.