For weeks, Fox had been pimping their “new summer series” Anchorwoman. It wasn’t even until this week that I realized it was a reality show and not a bad summer sitcom. Not that it would have mattered to me: I would have watched it either way, and had it been a good reality show, I would have loved it.
Instead, the one hour premiere (occupying the time slot of the recently concluded great So You Think You Can Dance) was, in fact, two 30 minute episodes, the first of which was so relatively trite, unimaginative and sleep-inducing that I couldn’t make it more than 10 minutes into the second episode before I finally said to myself, “Why am I bothering?”
So, the news yesterday that the show was “canceled after one airing” came as no surprise, and really, it shouldn’t have been one to Fox either. There was absolutely nothing interesting about this show. There certainly was nothing new in either the situation or the “characters.” I think what bugged me the most was the simple fact that here is your typical fish-out-of-water story where all of the “real” journalists on the show are all up-in-arms about how having this blonde, leggy spokesmodel join their station as an anchor will damage their journalistic integrity, and yet, none of them seemed to have any issue participating in this program, which I would find much more troublesome if I was judging their professional chops. The worst of the lot is the other female anchor/writer/producer who is obviously meant to be the prime antagonist (albeit, not necessarily a “villain’) because she’s the one hemming and hawing and shocked and awed and mouth-gaping the most. And yet, not once was her face blurred onscreen to mask her identity.
Whatever … the worst part is just that it was bad, not funny, not clever, not interesting and really a prime example of why all reality TV gets such a bad rap. Good riddance.
Out of Focus 