My thoughts on American Idol, Dancing With the Stars and Survivor.

My pointless thoughts on three TV contest shows. 

Cape Cod's own, Siobhan Magnus. Too Weird to Win?Too
much face hardware?, Too many high notes?

Rupert Boneham

Survivor (begun 1997)  One of the oldest of  TV  reality contest shows-I have  never really  watched this show,  I don't enjoy watching surly, tanned,  skinny,  people spending time running around sweating in bathing suits, trying to  figure out ways to out maneuver there fellow contestants. One year they had a cool guy with a beard -Rupert Boneham- but he was the exception, not the rule.     I think it would be cool if one of the seasons  of the show was   actually filmed in an environment where survival really was in question-like the frozen north or a war-zone. At least, maybe, the skanky girls wouldn't be able to wear bathing suits. 

American  Idol (begun 2002) This show has done little of value for American Music, but has done much  to enrich the pockets of the Fox TV network and it's producers. The show has produced  some   talented singers (often among the runner-ups)  and generated many hit songs, but very little of the music generated from the show or it's artists has been of any great worth.

Originally, the contest  focused  solely on  young solo singers, armed only  with vocal talent. In recent years, the rules have been loosened up to allow for some slightly older singers, and to allow singers to play instruments.  In recent years , the focus of the  voting audience has been to  pick the cutest singer, as opposed to the most talented.   One thing that always bothered me about the show is that the singers  always compete by covering old  beaten -to death -songs, but then when these singers  actually put out their albums  they invariably record mostly new songs usually written by outside writers.  Why not have the contestants  compete on the show with some  of these  new songs as well?   After a few years of declining ratings, the show  left the air in April 2016. However, it returned  a year later in a new iteration in March 2018.


Dancing with the Stars (begun 2005 ) Based on a British TV show, they should have called this Dancing with the B-list, since the stars in question are almost  never actually A-List   stars.....Every year I look at the list of performers  and normally about half of the people I have never heard of,or at least could not pick out of a line-up. It doesn't help that the professional dancers are of course unrecognizable, as well ,and that the contestants usually must  dress in  campy ballroom dancing costume and makeup. . What I like about the show is that many of the contestants haven't actually danced in the past, and thus they are showing  a ton  of  guts to get up there on national TV and  possibly  make fools of themselves.