TV Question Qorner: ESPN’s grief management, Coach the dragon-slayer, et cetera
Baseball Tonight. No doubt they meant well, and what happened to Nick Adenhart is undeniably a tragic waste, but Thursday’s Very Special Episode seemed to me like cynical pandering.I can barely trust BT to tell me how to feel about Rangers pitching, and while I can’t imagine how Adenhart’s family and teammates must feel, that’s the point; it’s not Buck Showalter who’s going to enlighten me on the subject, not with the file footage of the destroyed minivan on my TV screen.
I do wonder how much time the producers would have given it if the early-season schedule hadn’t left them so much room.Or is that my own cynicism?
Making the Band 4. Que texted Will from the…living room?
RW/RR Challenge. So did Shauvon sleep with CT or not?My vote: she didn’t, but she did sleep with someone even more scandalous than that (or a producer or something), so instead of just flat-out saying she didn’t have sex with CT, she’s issuing non-denial denials.
And why is Adam still such a mosquito when it comes to CT?It’s like picking a fight with a hurricane; yes, a hurricane is destructive, and yes, you have every right to hate it, but trying to punch it is just going to get you fucked up.
This of course ignores the question of how the production team can still indemnify itself against CT’s rages at this late date.Yeah, in theory he’s good TV, if you can square that with yourself ethically, but in practice, he’s barely able to get as far as the airport shuttle without getting into a brawl, so why bother?He got booted off the season by, what, minute 28?
Survivor. At last, the merge.The few weeks leading up to a merge each season test my willingness to stick with a given season, and in the seasons where I do bail out, it’s always right around here — I skip a few episodes, realize I don’t care anymore, and revoke the season pass.But I’ve stuck with it for Tocantins, because Coach is so deliciously annoying that awaiting his ouster, and the hilariously ill-advised Knights Of The Soccer Ball metaphorizing that will obviously follow, is entertainment enough.
Do guys like Coach — with the Jedi hair and the self-seriousness and the calling themselves “Coach” — get by in life because they’re so ridiculous that nobody calls them on it, figuring that surely someone else will call them on it so why bother?Is it a Kitty Genovese situation where everyone around them is like, “I don’t want to get involved”?Week after week, I ask the cats, “Does he hear himself?He must; he must just not care, because…but does he hear himself?”
I also ask the cats when Probst is going to learn to pronounce the first L in “vulnerable.”
And how long as CBS been calling Brendan an “entreprenuer”?Every time I’ve ever caught an on-screen spelling error, it’s been on CBS.Every single time.
Tags: Baseball Tonight Buck Showalter Jeff Probst Kitty Genovese Making the Band 4 Nick Adenhart our friend English RW/RR Challenge TV
People like coach get away with it because they are so freakishly scary that other people don’t want to challenge them. They’re afraid the guy’s going to snap and they’ll be collateral damage.
I agree about ESPN’s coverage of the Adenhart tragedy, it seems very self serving to me. This is one of those times where I think the blog world has done a better job of remembering Adenhart. The blogs are written by fans and so the impact is felt and shown much more. The thing is that I’ve been feeling this way about ESPN for a long time now. It seems like they are always trying to show how this kind of thing effects them rather than how it effect sports in general. Now I stay away from ESPN for everything except for the games themselves ( and truly for my local teams I’d rather watch the local broadcast instead of the national one).
I’m not saying I felt great about it, but I was kind of hoping CT would land a solid blow (even inadvertently) on one of those production guys who were trying to subdue him. You know he would never get asked back after that. It’s ridiculous that that’s what it would *take*, but whatever gets the job done. His being in the casting mix for new seasons passed the point of being untenable a long time ago. It’s all well and good to puff out your chest and make stern statements about a “no tolerance for violence” policy, but when people like CT know they’re going to get a clean slate with each new season (even if they do things that would get them criminally charged in the ‘real’ real world), it rings pretty hollow.
Regarding Adam, I think he’s afraid of the guy and he also hates him (reasonable on both counts), and he’s gotten to the point where he thinks his options are being bullied and backing down meekly or being bullied and returning fire to the degree he’s able. Or, you know, taking the real-estate exam and putting this trashy show in his past, but the perennials don’t seem to give that option much consideration.
Maybe they need to start drug-testing the RW/RR people because even though I haven’t seen the episode yet and have just seen the little clip they showed on The Soup, but…yeah. CT’s on steroids. Even his voice gives it away. I don’t know why they let him come back anyway – he hit someone last time, too, so why take the chance and bring him back? (I know, I know, ratings.)
I love that the editors hate Coach as much as the audience does. It’s like they go out of their way to highlight his stupid moments as much as possible.
Re Coach: I can’t imagine how everyone there doesn’t think he’s a useless, arsey, posturing blowhard. There have been some comments from Erinn, Tyson & Sierra that suggest that everyone knows very well what kind of person he is, but a) they haven’t had the opportunity in the last few episodes to boot his douchey ass out, and b) as Brendan says, he’s a dink, but he’s predictable, and predictable is good…unless, as it appears thus far with Brendan, you seem to have no idea that said predicable dink is also predictably gunning for you because you don’t suck up to him. I’d expect that Brendan knows that sucking up is the way to win Coach’s approval, but has too much self-respect to do so.
Another point: Coach is probably the guy everyone wants for final since a number of them already despise him & the rest will resent him for making it to the end while they (smarter! more integrity! less likely to toss dirty river water on cooking beans and insincerely apologize!) are relegated to the jury. These people aren’t too obviously playing endgame while still midgame, but they have to be thinking about it. Certainly Tyson is, but to my mind, he’s almost as much of an arse as Coach, so for him it’s definitely important to have a bigger douche sitting next to him at the end. Of course, if either – or worse, both – of them make it to the end, I will cry.
@Jenn: But then that leads to various thorny questions: if veterans such as CT, Mark Long, and Eric Nies were to test positive for PEDs, should their previous Challenge victories still count? Should they return any X-Boxes and SUVs they have won? Or should there just be asterisks next to their names? ;)
I don’t watch Survivor, but if Coach is the kind of guy I’m familiar with, some people probably avoid challenging him because he’ll turn it around onto them and haul out a bunch of newage psychobabble about how they’re just afraid of themselves or something, and then they have to try to defend themselves against accusations that are unanswerable in their sheer ridiculousness while other people are going “yeah, yeah, that’s pretty deep.”
Kind of like That Guy who accuses you of being “uptight” when you don’t want to have sex with him. You know it’s bullshit, but how do you even respond?
Confession: I do like that Steve Berthiaume fellow on Baseball Tonight. I can always count on having a better time when he’s in Ravech’s spot. He has a sly deadpan thing going on, yet seems really to be a passionate fan of the game; and although he puts his trademarks in heavy rotation, I keep finding them amusing in spite of myself (for example, the way some journeyman who was a utility infielder for Chicago in half of the 2006 season gets described as “former White Sox great [so-and-so]”).
He may have made a fan for life the night the rest of the panel questioned his nicknaming Xavier Nady “The Untyer” (“So why not ‘The Tiebreaker’?”) and he started shouting, in a pitch-perfect Jason Alexander, “It’s a good line and I’m not gonna dumb it down for some boneheaded mass audience! The Untyer! JERK STORE!” If you’re going to bust out a Seinfeld reference, that’s the way to do it: steer clear of the done-to-death stuff and play to the scholars.
When my daughter was wee and I was still nursing her, I would be up at ungodly hours watching the news on channel 4 (WNBC). The news crawl at the bottom was (at the time) the most amazingly misspelled/bad-grammared news crawl ever. I was sleep deprived and cranky so I fired off at least four emails volunteering to proofread their crawl every morning before they went on the air. Hilariously, I got a poorly-spelled email in response thanking me “but we have rigorous editing standards.”
Um, okay!!
And… shut up, Coach.
I thought after you hit someone on RW/RR, you were not welcome back, ever.
While they have broken this time and time again (Abe, CT…), they continue to repeat this as a rule. Abe seems to have changed, but CT is such a rage-aholic…I was really uncomfortable watching him the other night. Dude is so huge the other ‘roided out castmates – 5 of them – couldn’t hold him back. It’s not even good TV when it makes you want to throw up while watching it.
RE: Steroids at the challenges. I think it was the last one where all the men, and possibly Ev, had taken them prior to returning. Kenny, Evan, Bananas, Brad, etc. were all HUGE, and all ragey. It looks like Evan got off them, he is much slimmer this season, but they were gross to watch.
Come to think of it, I have no idea why I even watch this crap. It’s a bad habit I just can’t kick.
There has been a TON of Adenhart coverage locally (I live in Maryland, which is where he grew up) and it is sort of odd.
The day after he died, I turned on ESPN to freaking SCOTT BORAS sobbing at a press conference. I don’t hate Boras the way most people do (I admire him, actually) and he did know Adenhart personally, so it was jarring to see. He has an ugly cry that would put most actresses to shame. I suppose the image was newsworthy, since Boras has such a hardass public persona, but it felt a little exploitative to put him on TV like that. Exploitative. Of Scott Boras. That’s a sign that a line has been crossed.
It’s hard for baseball writers/producers to walk away from a story about the accidental death of a young player, since the innocence of youth is such a huge part of baseball’s mythology. But A.E Houseman (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/To_an_Athlete_Dying_Young) has already covered it, so let’s move along.