SnideAsides

Unexpected news for next season:

I'm pretty confident it won't be Serena for the same reason Naomi felt out of place in Tokyo and the same reason Rio didn't pick Pele: it'll be "Serena Williams: Tennis Legend" lighting the cauldron and not "Serena Williams: Olympian". Same thing with any of the Dream Team members. My left-field pick would probably be Greg Louganis. But I do think the obvious choice is Phelps, both because of his status as an Olympian and because, somehow, it has never been a swimmer before. Even in that big gaggle of people London had, none of them were swimmers. The only thing that's making me less than 100% confident is the games after are in Australia, and you'd have to imagine they'd want to pick Ian Thorpe for it, which may weigh on the decision slightly.

The Australian commentators have just explicitly called out the "final set is now just a big tiebreaker" rule in the men's doubles final a big load of shit invented solely to placate NBC lol

I mean, if you start ruling out every city that'd had bad things happen there decades earlier, you're not going to be able to find anyone to host the thing. That's a bit like saying London shouldn't have hosted because of The Troubles or Seoul shouldn't have hosted because of the Korean War. I don't blame Munich for wanting to change their international reputation. (Apparently Germany announced last week they're going to bid for 2040, and between Bach being German and the fact they're one of only a few places that can still afford it, it seems like it's probably not that far off being a done deal.)

Is there no gala this time around? It's usually one of the more fun things during the Olympics but I can't see it on the schedule anywhere?

It's run by a consortium of public broadcasters with different national laws about advertising on their channels (the BBC for example is so strict that they have to cutaway to precorded skits every year while the hosts are pimping the contest's own CD and DVD), so there's a blanket rule against product placement in order for every act to be shown in every country for people to vote on. If anyone's wondering, Finland finished 19 out of 25 in the final. (Given how obvious it was that Redacted Country was going to try and rig the vote for the PR boost - and they STILL finished second in the public vote to Baby Lasagna - there was a concerted effort to try and unite support around other acts that could do well enough with juries to prevent them from winning, which led to a whole bunch of songs like Finland's doing surprisingly terribly.)

Bit of an odd choice to have 25th Anniversary promo signage so heavily visible at the Riverdance task considering it's 30 in a couple of months. The first performance was April 30th, 1994; it was very famously the interval act at Eurovision that year. (Gaiety Theatre wasn't the venue then - the Point Theatre has since been demolished - but it did host Eurovision in 1971.)

Twice, and both legs have delivered to the point where it's absurd they don't go more often. First leg of TAR12 on the west coast with the highwire bike Road Block and the angry donkeys, and the penultimate leg of TAR22 in Belfast (I know, not technically Ireland, but still on the island) with the Titanic meal service and everyone getting confused over "chartreuse". Oddly a Riverdance-style group of dancers were the greeters in TAR22.

Slovenia was in Yugoslavia. Slovakia was in Czechoslovakia. Given the level of scenery on offer in this episode, it's sort of crazy that this is only the third leg ever in the former Yugoslavia. Massively underused region. Feels like if this show was being made before the fall of communism they'd probably have ended up in Yugoslavia at least as much as they do in Italy and Spain now. (Heck, all of Eastern Europe is underused. There are so many countries they've never touched, and yet this is somehow the first new Eastern European country since the Czech Republic all the way back in TAR15.)

The puteketeke is officially Bird of the Century.

They were spoiled in Jaipur and its surrounding suburbs over four days. Please stop baselessly speculating in the spoiler thread.

Romania is not rumored at all. And Kucing appears to be the Australian version, which is apparently inexplicably spending half its season hopping around Malaysia. The actual route per multiple sources seems to be: Legs 1 and 2: Bangkok and surrounds, Thailand Leg 3: Can Tho, Vietnam Leg 4: Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam Legs 5 and 6: Jaipur and surrounds, India Leg 7: Cologne, Germany Leg 8: Rural Slovenia Leg 9: Ljubljana, Slovenia Leg 10: Stockholm, Sweden Leg 11: Dublin, Republic of Ireland Leg 12: Seattle, Washington

Caught a clip of the Chinese restaurant episode on Twitter (I haven't been watching this season), and man, it's interesting that the show didn't learn not to fetishise being in the suburbs after all the criticism of that week in All-Stars, especially since they were in one of the exact same suburbs they used that time (Wantirna, where they did the "things people grew in their backyard" Mystery Box). Very bizarre.

Good news! They've banned pre-recorded vocals in Junior Eurovision this year, presumably partly because of all the dance breaks ruining the "song" part of "song contest", so they'll probably wind up being banned in Eurovision mothership again next year.

New season has been delayed because Jock died:

Some of the grand acts have been announced (there's usually stuff we don't find out until the night, like Love Love Peace Peace; even Madonna was only announced a couple of days earlier because the billionaire who bankrolled her appearance fee leaked it):

The only winning songs in the last like twenty years I've actually liked are Rise Like a Phoenix and Arcade, and I fully admit the latter is like 90% because my family is Dutch and I was thrilled for them to finally have a good result for once. I'm also disappointed that Sweden seems to be firming up as the defacto winner, because not only is it a not great song that's only doing as well as it because of who's singing it, it feels very similar to Euphoria and it would be a massive step back to just reward something that would have won ten years ago. Like at least when Ireland was winning every damn year in the 1990s they all felt like different songs that justified the result. I don't think it's helped this year that a lot of the countries that chose their song internally clearly thought Ukraine was going to romp home with it again and decided to just aim for getting through to the final and maybe end up on the left side of the board if they're lucky, rather than the usual "well, top five is good yeah?" result in case they finish second and still have to host the thing like the UK is. The thing that's going to be interesting this year is after all the rigged juries that got themselves disqualified and made them keep cutting to Not Jon Ola Sand to read the votes last year, and all the embarassingly low televote results since they split the reveal, they've removed juries from the semis entirely and the qualifiers will be determined by public vote only. So songs like the last few years of Swedish entries that do gangbusters with juries but nobody actually likes aren't guaranteed to get through this time around.

I wonder if the show is (probably falsely) thinking their "this is so obviously a parody that it's not legally actionable" excuse from the Eat Shit Bob stuff will work again here.

That was Pentatonix. Next!

I love that the "nobody is agreeing to a full season any more because of The Incident" situation has now extended to Dick Van Dyke clearly refusing to do the narration for his clue package, so instead they just got someone to impersonate Yeardley Smith for some reason.

X-Factor had a fair few. None quite as big as the biggest Idol people, but Samantha Jade, Johnny Ruffo, and Isaiah Firebrace were all from there. Sheldon Riley was a Voice winner. Jack Vidgen was an AGT winner. Idol is definitely the big one though. Scott Tweedie used to host kids shows on ABC3 about ten years ago until 11 (now 10Peach) poached him to host their replacement for Video Hits. Mostly works for E! in the US now, but also guest hosted DWTS when Grant Denyer was sick one week and Amazing Race Australia for like five episodes when a dude who doesn't understand physical boundaries predictably managed to catch Covid like four days into filming. He's got the cred for a show like this but good lord the gravitas is lacking. Are we doing obtuse TWOP-sryle nicknames for people this season? That was one of my favourite things about OG Idol.

Challenge Global Championship drops March 8 on P+. This despite the CBS cast publicly and vocally hating everything about the show, the Australian version getting bumped midseason and ending up with just 11,000 viewers for its finale (not a typo, and the lowest primetime rating for a non-cable channel in Australian TV history), and the Argentinian and British versions apparently being such disasters their networks are refusing to even air them. https://variety.com/2023/tv/news/the-challenge-world-championship-format-hosts-premiere-date-1235500010/

WIDM23 starts January 7th for those who haven't seen it yet. Location is South Africa again, but a different part of the country than last time (Cape Town and the southwest coast compared to Soweto/Johannesburg and Kruger National Park). Also we don't have a date for the next Belgian season yet (though it usually starts a week or so either side of the WIDM finale in March), but the location's been confirmed as Arizona.

I'm fine with charters too; my problem is it's a solution that theoretically would allow them to visit the sorts of places there aren't a lot of existing flights to, and yet they really aren't doing it. Like, even within the context of being limited to Europe (and Jordan), the locations have been pretty dire. If you've got access to your own plane that would allow you to go nearly anywhere within that part of the world, I don't want to see Munich for the sixth time, or France for the fourth time in five seasons. Go to like Montenegro or Slovakia or one of the Baltic states instead, you know?

Can I be honest? I've really hated the format this season. I know they were basically forced into it as a way of getting known faces after the whole situation last season (and, like, no way were Shatner or Gaynor doing a full season anyway), but I feel like between the format and all the filler like Robin and Nicole singing, I barely care about any of the acts. I think season two had it right - four heats at the start to weed out the obvious "I will only do one episode" people, then the same groups-of-six being merged at six format as season one to winnow out a few people who were fine being there for two or three episodes but didn't want to do the whole lot. There's just not enough of a "put the puzzle together" element to this show if half of them are only getting one clue package.