THAT LATE-SPRING STINK
These shows may seem like the bottom of TV’S barrel
Ultimate Tag Wednesdays, Fox
Celebrity Watch Party Thursdays, Fox
Labor of Love Thursdays, Fox
HANK STUEVER
By now, it’s entirely possible you’ve over-binged on television and have grown sick of it. Believe me, I sympathize. The one form of entertainment that was supposed to see us through the pandemic shutdown is also still the fastest route to craptown.
The month of May was like this even in TV’S usual, non-pandemic times. Once the season finales are over and the singing competitions have crowned their winners, networks often set their trash out on the curb, usually just before the month ends.
Three new shows from Fox (Ultimate Tag, Labor of Love and Celebrity Watch Party) certainly have that late-spring stink about them — each mildly enjoyable in a fleeting way while also serving as a sort of omen about what lies at the bottom of most barrels.
Only one — Celebrity Watch Party — can be fully regarded as a product of the COVID-19 moment. Based on a 2013 British show called Gogglebox (already copied as The People’s Couch on Bravo several years ago), it’s a show about watching people (celebrities, in this case) sit on their couches at home and yell at the screen while they watch TV.
Participants include Rob Lowe and his sons; Tyra Banks and her mother; Joe Buck and his wife; Meghan Trainor and her family; Justin Long and his brother; Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak and his wife; Raven-symoné and some friends; and, it almost goes without saying, the ever-available Osbournes.
It’s hard to think of a show that would be easier to make, which is why Fox ordered 10 episodes last month to fill up some of the prime-time schedule while the network, like its competitors, rations out what’s left in its cupboards. The celebs are of course game, because all their other gigs have dried up.
The viewer’s reflexive response is of course despair: Has it really come to this, you ask — watching other people watch TV?
Luckily, critics and others already worked through this quandary, back when Bravo’s version premièred. The People’s Couch seemed at first like a new low in a medium out of ideas, but those of us who actually watched it found it charmingly (if absurdly) intimate, mainly because the viewers Bravo chose to follow were personable, diverse and willing to say whatever was on their minds about what they were seeing. Their passion for good and bad television — as well as their low-stakes regard for it — had a leavening effect on my own self-important sense of criticism. It was a reminder that TV is, after all, just TV. Sometimes the best thing about it is its role as a reliable campfire, around which we gather with those we love.
Celebrity Watch Party has a similar vibe, as its participants howl in anguish (on a recent episode) while watching Kings of Pain, History’s horrifying reality show in which two dudes (a wildlife biologist and an animal handler) subject themselves to stings and bites from exotic insects and reptiles. As a visual of 2020’s stay-at-home misery, it should hang in a museum, where, with its subtle range of suffering and ennui, it can beguile visitors for centuries to come.
Ultimate Tag, meanwhile, comes to us from another time, not so long ago, when it might have been fun to have a sweaty fitness fiend with a name like
The Caveman or Banshee or
The Flow chase you around an obstacle course and try to rip a tag from your shirt. Now you’d give anything for jockos like that to give you at least six feet when you’re out for a walk or navigating the narrow aisles of a grocery store.
Hosted by all three football-playing Watt brothers (J.J. and the other two), the competition seems to have emanated from a semi-professional tag circuit — which, if you don’t mind, I’ll skip researching so as not get further depressed about the state of adulthood.
Labor of Love, a mating reality series, is far less confused about what it wants to be. Its central subject is 41-year-old Kristy Katzmann, determined to find a man ready to have a baby. Katzmann has been to the fertility experts and even had some of her eggs frozen as a backup plan. Her doctor says she is ready to roll.
So it’s off to Atlanta (it’s always
Atlanta), where Netflix’s recent reality hit Love Is Blind made the world safe again for the basic dating show, and where no trope is too tropey and viewers get to experience the process without suffering a whit of voyeuristic regret.
Aided by Sex and the City’s Kristin Davis as host, Katzmann begins meeting a crop of 15 eligible men, all in their 30s and 40s, who swear they’re ready to settle down and be a dad.
Unlike The Bachelorette, where the dreams are of rings, wedding bells and foofy la-deedas, Labor of Love is more bluntly and even gallingly heteronormative: It is literally about breeding, obsessed with a biological outcome above all other options, including adoption, which Davis mentions was the right solution for her.
As Katzmann begins to narrow the field, Labor of Love’s most winning aspect is that it is finished — in the can, as they say, and ready to take its place on a schedule that will look more sparse as the summer continues.
I’m not ready to sound all the alarms, but if I watched four hours of Labor of Love, imagine how desperate we’re going to get in the weeks and months ahead.