Celebrity Diving Is No Joke. Well, It Is. But It's Also Real.

I've been having fun lately at the expense of NBC, reveling—as much of the TV-conscious Internet has—in the continually lower lows to which their scripted programming is sinking.​ But shows written by writers are not the only place that broadcast networks are clueless. Although they pioneered the Frankenstein that is reality programming, the Big Four have lost control of the monster. Vulture wrote yesterday, in a round-up of opinions from "unscripted insiders,"​ that network television hasn't produced a new hit reality show since The Voice​, in 2011.

​I'm more interested in trying to figure out why network scripted programming is so awful. But the fact that its lowest-common-denominator ratings-grab reality programming is not just terrible but unpopular is interesting as well. What's the problem? Let's ask the insiders!

"They rarely take chances,"

"There's a saturation factor going on. If you put a pawn show on cable, a year later, there's 25 of them."

"The genre has gotten mature. It means that less is going to work, just because there's a cynicism that's set in with the audience. You can't shock people with an idea that would have before."

"The division between broadcast and cable is arbitrary and artificial, a way to make excuses to higher-ups who lack vision and creativity."

And my personal favorite:​

"This whole business puts you in a scaredy-cat place. It's hard to try to stay fearless."

So essentially, network reality shows are bad for the same reasons everything else they do is so bad: bloat. Shows are too big, too long and too expensive, and all that money makes it impossible to take risks. But as Vulture​ does point out, the networks do have something up their sleeve that cable would never dare attempt: celebrity diving. It's real, and it's...terrible.

Splash​ premiered last night on ABC, following hot on the heels of Fox's one-off special Stars In Danger: The High Dive​. How bad does it look? Well, sample a promo.

On Tuesday March 18th, the stars will fall. Splash marks the first time 10 celebrities will train and compete in regulation platform and springboard diving at dizzying heights in front of a weekly poolside audience. Leading up to the competition, the world's most decorated and medaled diving legend, Greg Louganis, will give each celebrity weeks of training.

This show is stupid. There's no point in my rubbing it in. But I want to point out a few questions that have to be answered before a show is greenlit. 

• ​Are Americans interested in professional diving?
• Are Americans so interested in professional diving that, when promised "celebrity diving," they won't mind being offered a former Girl Next Door​ instead?
• Are Americans so amused by the idea of fat men and little people hurting themselves that they will tune in to a show built around that concept?​
• Are Americans hungry for more Louie Anderson?​ Like, tearing at their chest, screaming in agony hungry?

Based on the promo for Splash​, ABC thinks the answer to all three of those questions is a resounding "Hell yes!" 

What shocks me about shows like this isn't that they're stupid.​ Obviously, network TV thinks Americans are dumb. (They aren't.) But broadcast television is big money. It's high stakes. There are fortunes riding on it. So why does everything they do seem so lazy? Why does everything they do seem so cheap?

An Incredibly Well-Reasoned Argument Against 'Girls'

Since the end of its first season, I've tried to figure what it is about Girls that irks me. I've never watched a television show that fights its viewership quite as hard as this one. While that sounds good on paper—really, I'm all for difficult TV—there's something about Girls​ that I find impossible to watch, or even explain. I wonder sometimes if I would like the show better if shown it in a vacuum, if I knew nothing about its origin and had read no commentary of it on the Internet. But as it is, everything I read about Girls​ makes me want to watch it less. So all of this week's ballyhoo about the terrible-sounding Season 2 finale got me thinking again. Because it's apparently impossible for me to speak coherently about this show, I decided on a very easy, very fun way out:

I missed last night’s Girls finale. Missed the whole season, in fact. This wasn’t due to any particular choice, it just so happened that after the first episode of the second round premiered, I had no urge to torrent it, convert it for use on my DVD player, and watch it on my incredibly fancy $40 TV. (That’s right—it’s a Trinitron.) The fact is, I just don’t like that show, and I’ve spent the last seven or eight months trying to puzzle out why.

There’s no good reason for me to dislike Girls. The show is funny, well-made, and occasionally features Chris O’Dowd. It’s about a place where I live and characters that are like people that I know. And Lena Dunham is ungodly talented—as a writer, but as an actor too. The show is sickening in a way that I like my television—sickening like Curb, like the British Office, like Peep Show—and yet it leaves me cold. The best answer I can come up with is a cop out, but a beautiful cop out, a cop out so elegant and wonderful that you will thank me for sharing it with you. Why did I lose interest in Girls?

Because I hate its stupid face.

For better or worse, it goes on from there.​ I thought I'd made a funny point. The commenters didn't agree, calling me "completely irrelevant," "an airhead," "embarrassing" and "really, really dumb." Well, you can't please everyone. Or, apparently, anyone. No matter. Because people hated it, that post got more pageviews than anything I've written for Bullett, which says more about the Internet than I ever could.