I watched this this afternoon, I mentioned it briefly on Twitter, I briefly mention those things again here:
- Needs better chemistry between the regulars.
- Needs to be funnier.
- Needs to drop the Question of Sport branding, it doesn’t help either the main show or this spin-off – in fact just calling it Super Saturday and not limiting to sport might be the better idea.
- It was slightly baffling how Matt’s team were on the left of the screen on the sofas and on the score graphic, but on the right on the challenges.
- Some halfway decent ideas in fairness, although after setting up Top Gear style establishing shots in the OBs, they bottle it completely, direction is functional rather than interesting or outstanding.
- Yeah yeah, A League of Their Own. ALOTO certainly didn’t invent sporting challenges in a quiz (actually this has very little quiz content), but it certainly ran with the idea the furthest.
- It’s not awful, but it does feel rather unnecessary, and rather bafflingly both too loose AND not loose enough.
Rising Star was pretty mediocre in the ratings- NBC put a special new episode of America’s Got Talent against it, and won by about 50% (though these are preliminary numbers, ABC asked for some special rating calculations because of the live nature which haven’t come out yet).
My main issue was the pacing- slow, slow, slow…They had 10 contestants sing in the 2 hour program, and each contestant did about 90 seconds- so they had actual singing time of about 15 minutes. The problem was that before each performance they had a long introduction piece so that people could “check in” on the app to vote (for calculation purposes, which I understand)- which seemed to take longer than the actual performance. This is something they could easily have done during the commercials, which would save some time. 10 performances is simply unacceptable- it should be closer to 16-18 in two hours.
I don’t know how this would translate to the UK- they wouldn’t need as much time theoretically because there wouldn’t be as many possible voters- but this is looking like one of those shows which is great in theory (and in other, smaller countries), but simply doesn’t work in the US market for various reasons.