“Spy TV”
Tonight at 9:30 on Ch. 4
½
IF you loved the original “Candid Camera,” you’ll like “Spy TV.” Or should I say, you’ll like the show’s second season in its revamped format.
Last year, when it debuted to huge ratings (for a summer replacement), it was more like cruel “Candid Camera” than funny “Spy TV.” In fact it got so extreme that the practical jokes practically turned into practically dead.
I mean, let’s face it, they’d lose the laughs if any of the pigeons had actually dropped dead. But then again, maybe not – considering the way TV is playing lately.
What is great about the revamped show are the practical jokes. When the producers get out of their own way, the show’s as funny as the original “Candid Camera.”
That aside, you’ll laugh yourself silly watching a guy who thinks he’s won a contest where he gets to drive in an Indy 500 car. Instead he and his friends are picked up by a disgruntled chauffeur in a Lincoln who ends up “lost” and drives right onto the track while an actual race is going on. The chauffeur is really a stunt driver, and it’s side-splitting.
There are also several skits in the screener they sent which aren’t in tonight’s debut. One of the funniest is with unsuspecting women who end up in situations where their boyfriends (who are in on it) are confronted in a parking lot by angry thugs whom they must single-handlely beat to a pulp.
There’s another skit with a 400-pound man who pretends to be a parking attendant and gets stuck in people’s cars. We were weeping with laughter in the office. (Of course the last time everyone gathered around my desk to laugh out loud the show (“Greg The Bunny’) lasted 14 minutes before getting the big ax.)
So, why only 2 ½ stars?
Easy.The show is ruined by the horrible host, Ali Landry, a former Miss USA, current Doritos commercial babe, who parades around a stage like a brain-dead, sexed-up Loretta Young, reciting lines so badly that you’d think reading was her second language.
Talk about not being able to walk and talk at the same time. Greg the Bunny was more life-like.
Anyway, it would be bad enough if she just stood still, but for reasons too scary to contemplate, she seems to constantly shimmy while making suggestive comments.
Hot? Not. It looks like she’s suffering from a bizarre neurological disorder.
But really, who wouldn’t try to distract the audience from lines like, “Their boyfriends just wanted to scare the crap out of them on national TV.” Or “What red-blooded American male ‘wou-ent’ die to work on a lingerie shoot with a sexy model?”
Why they bothered with the beauty queen when they already had a built in audience of 18-49 year old males, I don’t know. The other really dopey thing is that they have an announcer interrupting the skits every three seconds to tell us – the brain-damaged audience – what is happening.
It’s one thing to desperately crave 18-49 year old male viewers, it’s another to think that the very people they so desperately crave are boneheads and psychos.
