I have watched more television in the last month than I have in God knows how long. Of course, the Dish crapped out with some stored up highlight reels and a few games I meant to watch, and by the time we got Directv installed, the European season was pretty much over. Because there are precious few things you can do while holding a baby (reading is sadly very difficult especially if you have bad eyes) and by far the easiest option is watching television. So we’ve each logged a lot of Food Network and HGTV. I also recorded the first season of The Deadliest Warrior on Spike.

The show’s premise is quite good if you’re a nerd like me: a team assesses the strengths and weaknesses of given a pair of warriors throughout history (pirates, knights, Green Berets, vikings, samurai, etc.) by testing their weapons and armor, then they run a computer simulation 1000 times to see who the winner would be if they had fought.

What I find amusing (and also frustrating) with Spike’s programming is how smack talk and testosterone must find their way to the center of every show. This show could just as easily have a Mythbusters-esque feel with joking around and no one taking themselves all that seriously. Instead, the producers have gone full throttle (oh sorry, FULL THROTTLE!!!) in the other direction, so the show ends up being a lot of trash talking and one-upmanship between the two parties. So instead of simply going through the weapons and fighting styles, instead we get the William Wallace guys telling the Shaka Zulu guys that they suck, that their shields would never hold up to the claymore sword while the Shaka Zulu guys say that the weapons are slow…yada yada yada. I love how all of them use the word “we” when discussing the battle strategies, as if they themselves were medieval Scotsmen or Zulu warriors.

I especially didn’t care for the smack talk during the contemporary match-ups of IRA vs. Taliban and Mafia vs. Yakuza. While it’s no stretch to say the show glorifies violence—it revels in it—but there’s something strange about watching men attacking gel dummies with such pride and zeal when the conflicts portrayed are not from distant history. This was particularly true for the IRA guys. In order for the show to have been cast appropriately, they should have had the Taliban guys being gung-ho jihad death-to-all-infidel types rather than the anti-Taliban operatives who described the weapons and techniques; or to turn the tables, wouldn’t it have been more fair to have the IRA discussed by members of English task forces charged with combating the terrorists? It was definitely distasteful to see these IRA guys talking so proudly of the violence perpetrated, regardless of whichever side of the political issue you’re on.

Of course, this can’t have escaped the notice of the good folks at Spike. But it’s just about good TV, right?

Current Mood: Tired |