If you want a study in absolute cattiness, head on over to Tom Shales' review of NBC's new game show, Identity. You really should read the whole article, but some tidbits are particularly juicy:

Bob Saget has experienced a brief and unnecessary career revival by filling the Mandel role on the execrable "1 vs. 100," another show of this ilk, and William Shatner, whose career now consists almost entirely of mortifying self-parody, also has done a Mandellian turn in ABC's horrific monstrosity "Show Me the Money."

First impressions can be accurate, of course, and one's first impression of "Identity" is likely to be that it is a miserably tedious mess

Similarly, the producers probably think they lucked out big time because their first contestant, a woman from Streamwood, Ill., is bouncy, noisy, shrieky, jolly and gabby as all get-out. She's everything you don't want at a dinner party but which producers do want on game shows. It could be, though, that they've miscalculated, because the contestant is so obnoxiously over-the-top from the get-go that many a viewer will stick around purely on the hope that she'll suffer a humiliating defeat [...] the peppery little barracuda does carry away, but we can say that she seldom passes up an opportunity to behave like an imbecile ("You know, No. 1 does look like a bad momma-jomma").

Now that, people, is talent.

Labels: tv