Help! My TV is stuck on crap.

Dawn and I discovered a strange bizarre-o world of TV last weekend. I guess part of making TV is to evaluate what’s been successful in the past and attempt to blend elements together to make new shows. I’m going to go out on a limb and suggest that what we witnessed it what happens when the new blended show is not successful.

The first show we happened upon was TLC’s Take Home Handyman. I suppose the idea was to take the “take home” aspect of Take Home Chef and apply it to a home improvement show. Everyone knows if you’re going to be a successful take home anything you need to have an accent of some sort (British seems to be a popular take home expert accent). In Take Home Handyman they’ve tapped Andrew Dan-Jumbo as the accented expert (you might remember Andrew from TLC’s While You Where Out).

I guess trying to create another Take Home a British Guy TV show isn’t all that surprising…but what pushed the show over into bizarre-o territory is fact that they had rigged it so he was helping out Angela from The Office. During entire show they got The Office cast members to make short little cameos in the pretense that they were helping Angela work on her house. Here Toby, hold this drill and smile for the camera. Hey look, Kelly is laying tile in the bathroom….for 15 minutes. Weird, just plain weird.

If that hadn’t been strange enough television we later happened upon America’s Next Most Smartest Model. Don’t read the title too many times; it will just hurt your head. Evidently VH1 wanted to get in on the hot America’s Next Top Model action…but they needed to mutate the concept a bit. What they added was Ben Stein (like from Ferris Bueller, Win Ben Stein’s Money, and all over TV and politics). To be honest Dawn and I didn’t really see this show. We just caught the tail end of it, long enough to see Ben Stein deliver some awesome deadpan lines to a bunch of stupid looking models. I guess the show’s concept is you have to be a good model and be smart enough to get past Ben Stein. From the little we saw of it, the show it looked completely awful….but it’s hard to hate Ben Stein.

If television insists on taking shows that are already out there, combining them, and pumping out new crap, then perhaps I could suggest a combination. Here’s the show I would watch religiously. “Tim Gunn and Ben Stein Critique the Hell out of You.” The show concept is simple. Tim Gunn and Ben Stein show up and make you feel stupid and unstylish. They’ll address the particular areas in which you are stupid and unstylish. Basically it’s a tour-de-force for some poor person’s self confidence. Now that would be good trashy television!