 Your Big Break (syndicated) The first episode I saw had a bartender doing a spot-on Joe Cocker, and far less successful (though potentially more entertaining) stabs at Grace Slick and the Blues Brothers. But, as Kid is quick to point out, this is not a lip-sync show: "it's real people … really singing!" At one hour, the show is at least twice as long as it needs to be, but in some ways that makes for more awkward fun than you could find in a simple 30 minute show. Highly pathetic and/or very forced home video footage shows each contestant in their "real" life before you get to see them dressed up as whoever they are imitating. This part of the show is either the best or most intolerable part depending on your misanthropy quotient – for there is nothing more entertaining/infuriating than seeing regular people being regular. I didn't catch a full episode the first time around, so I tuned in a few weeks later to see:
The great thing about the show is that the performers do the full song, but the audience is conditioned to expect it to end after the first chorus (like they usually do on lip-sync-type shows). There is an uncomfortable sort of boredom in watching a talented amateur perform a famous song – it's not bad like karaoke nor numbing like "Star Search," but rather very, very pointless. Which is precisely why I think it's great that the show is as long as it is. It's not entertaining, but becomes so after the attention span shorts out and you're left having to sit through an additional three minutes of a song you know by heart, performed similarly to (but worse than) the real version. The contestants fall into two camps: those that can do impressive mimicry, and those who simply cover the song while dressed like the star they are performing as, giving an illusion that they are more accurate than they really are. It's unclear whether the audience rates the contestants on accuracy or cheap thrills, because in this episode the Michael Jackson was extremely impressive, while the Frankie Valli was not impressive at all, but won. They probably just liked him because he's a veteran. Everyone loves a damn veteran. The Garth Brooks had no chance – extremely inaccurate and vastly unentertaining. (Fill in your own "Beam me up, Scotty" joke here.) For my money, the Debbie Harry was the best, though not for the performance as much as the home video portion, which depicted her working in an office with her divorced parents, who were still partners in business. I thought that in itself was better than most of the shows on UPN. Especially odd was a montage sequence which showed her doing various things and talking about her hobbies, one of which was reading – but they show her sitting on her bed reading Recovery From Compulsive Eating. Sure, that's a detail that 98% of the audience missed, but I was sitting there thinking of her sitting in her room telling this film crew about her recovery process for like half an hour, and then ultimately that gets used as a three-second snippet to demonstrate "I like to read." Sad and, yes, kind of funny. My favorite element of the show is that the audience literally roars throughout the show with virtually no stopping – as though they are being entertained to the maximum possible level, or conversely, as though the "applause" light is left on throughout the show. It must be a somewhat grueling thing to sit through at an actual taping. Christopher Reid tries hard, but you can almost feel his own shame at having to resort to host a show like this, although if he had any savvy about fame, he could have predicted this career trajectory the minute he stepped on an early 90s stage with a two-foot fade. Surely he never imagined he would, at some point down the road, utter the phrase "One mo' time fo' Spencer Hassenritter!" I envision he and Bob Saget becoming close friends over this. The biggest loser of all, of course, is anyone who appears on the show, because the terrible truth is that this show will be no one's big break, except for jackasses like me who get off on watching people degrade themselves.
Review by Deep Margaret Pussy © 1999 |