SnideAsides

I suspect producers were in her ear at some point being all "you're doing fine but we really need you to do something interesting so we can fill time explaining your sabotages." A lot of the time she's in exactly the right position - the first cell to get out of the prison, the side of the helicopter where she could see the dinghy, the bank control room, the detonator seat - and yet all she ever really seems to do is stall for time. Part of it's that the missions aren't super varied this time around (pretty much all treasure hunts, escape rooms, or game theory exercises) so the sabotages are kinda forced to be pretty similar. I don't think she's going to go down as a great Mole if she is, but part of it's definitely on production here to be fair.

I just want to know who the hell thought "I know who'll get the young people back after they boycotted last season! Mike Lookinland!"

It's concerning that all of the early reviews floating around seem to pretty consistently amount to "the challenges are good, but everything else... look, stick with it if you can". Considering almost all of the challenges we've seen in the preview were in last year's Dutch and Belgian seasons, if nobody has anything nice to say about the rest I'm probably not going to bother watching.

WIDM 23's location seems to be

They could have done a phone call scene if scheduling was the issue. I mean, they were able to find a way to film a Natalie Imbruglia cameo, even though she doesn't live in the country any more and never met any of the characters whose story she was supposed to care about. Happy Susan got the final 'real' lines of the show; she really has been the main character for decades. A little bit surprised we never saw any of the Timminses though, given they were supposed to be Toadie's relatives. I know there's other issues there (Stingray died, the two daughters both have US careers now), but I have to imagine it would have been possible to at least get Ben Nicholas in for the ghost sequence, given he was doing behind the scenes videos for the show's social media stuff until pretty recently so must have been on good terms with producers.

I'm going to miss this hilariously awful show.

I promise I'll try and be back next year; last year I was barely clinging on through my frustrations with the show (and basically only got through it because: Melissa Leong), but this year's theme felt like a cynical approach to try and recreate the magic of Back to Win, as though Ten decided the one thing that suddenly doubled the show's ratings was the returning contestants instead of, say, the novelty factor of the new judges or the show suddenly trying new challenges for the first time in years or the fact that most of the country was in lockdown right when it was airing and it was the last bastion of normality at a crazy time. And, like, even if that wasn't a strategic misfire, the problem is almost all of the people anyone wanted to see that the show could have conceivably gotten back were already on that season so this felt like "a bunch of new nobodies vs a bunch of old nobodies, plus Julie". Like, two years ago, we had Poh and Chris and Callum and Hayden and Amina and Emilia and (sigh) Reynold and Harry and Khanh and Reece and... meanwhile, this year, like... Aldo? John? Christina? Nobody was unironically excited about anyone except the winners and maybe Alvin returning, you know?

If she is buried in the backyard, it's going to make Otev interesting in a few weeks.

Incidentally, if you're wondering whether production still gives a shit about this show, they've announced what tomorrow night's pressure test is and it's one that's appeared on this show before. Twice.

I maintain that the "now the judges are contestants!" masterclass is invariably the worst episode of every season.

The team from Three Blue Ducks (ft Darren Robertson) was one of the immunity challenge opponents in the early weeks of Andy's season (they beat Mindy, as it happens). Plus back in those days, "experience in top restaurants" was part of the prize, so it stands to reason that that was the restaurant and he just never left.

Local council has spoken on John's banana appeal:

I'm disappointed they missed the two best Alison Hammond moments: when she was a contestant on the UK Big Brother and broke a table, and when she pushed a dude off of Ireland.

Here you go.

I do wonder if Australia would've done better if we hadn't changed the scoring format for Australia Decides and Voyager had been sent instead. Sheldon got swallowed up by all the ballads around him (though he did finish second in the semi; surprisingly, Sweden won Semi 2 by more than Ukraine won Semi 1), where as much as Voyager would've been seen as at attempt to redo Maneskin, it would've easily qualified in that weak semi and would have stood out much more in the final. I'm disappointed that Latvia finished fourteenth (and somehow got more points from juries than televoters?) and Ireland fifteenth in their semis. Worth noting though that there were big issues with the juries in Semi 2 that caused six of them (Azerbaijan, Georgia, Montenegro, Poland, Romania, and San Marino) to be turfed and replaced with the "we calculate the average score of similar countries" points San Marino usually does for its non-existent televote. Seems to be probably Azerbaijan getting busted rigging the votes again like they were in pretty much these exact same countries a few years ago; they qualified in their semi without winning ANY televote points.

Justice for Ireland. Losing that mediocre Katy Perry B-side in order to have yet more ballads (who qualified tenth? Was it Azerbaijan? I bet it was Azerbaijan) in the final is almost as much of a travesty as losing Latvia. Grand Final running order: 1. Czech Republic 2. Romania 3. Portugal 4. Finland 5. Switzerland 6. France 7. Norway 8. Armenia 9. Italy 10. Spain 11. Netherlands 12. Ukraine 13. Germany 14. Lithuania 15. Azerbaijan 16. Belgium 17. Greece 18. Iceland 19. Moldova 20. Sweden 21. Australia 22. United Kingdom 23. Poland 24. Serbia 25. Estonia It's obviously Ukraine (boo), but the big shock to me is they don't even feel like they're trying to make it tight. The next five favourites in the betting odds are the UK and Poland (back-to-back in a trio of similar songs with Australia that really should've been broken up), Spain and Italy (back-to-back in the first half), and Sweden (sandwiched between obvious televote vacuum Moldova and obvious jury vote vacuum Australia). Basically the only thing they've done that could prevent a runaway Ukraine win is give Moldova a decent slot rather than dumping it last in the running order like they usually do with the floorfiller-style songs that draw the second half. Fun fact: Since producers started deciding the running orders in 2013, this is the fifth time the song performed first in the Grand Final was one of the last two performed in Semi Final 2.

Yeah that's where I'm at too. I do think we need songs like Ireland in the final now as a counterpoint to the ballads, but really none of the songs that could be decent at that are strong enough to get through. San Marino is terrible (but he's a HUGE star in Italy so the crowd cheers will be massive), Finland is in the same situation as Bulgaria where it's a perfectly good song that would have comfortably finished third in the early-mid 2000s but music has moved on since then, Romania has an earworm but the dude is definitely more of a dancer than a singer, and so on. Like I know songs like Australia and especially Sweden are absolutely going to qualify, but "more minor-key ballads" is the LAST thing we need after the results of the first semi. I've seen tweets from the hardcore Eurovision fans that having so many acts draw first half after qualifying yesterday is going to be good for Sweden because it's probably going to draw second half and they'll be slotted right at the end to break it up, but honestly I feel like people are still going to be bored of ballads by then, and in any case "a more cynical Voila, with 90% of the raw emotion replaced by the most generic Swedish dance beat, sung worse" doesn't feel like the sort of thing that's going to hugely impress enough people to win? First half at the moment: Armenia, France, Germany, Italy (who've been randomly assigned Slot #9), the Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Spain, Switzerland, and Ukraine; three slots left for semi 2 qualifiers. Second half: Greece, Iceland, Lithuania, Moldova, and the UK; seven slots left. Moldova is absolutely getting Slot #25 for a big finish, but I genuinely can't pick who'll be opening yet. Will they sacrifice a ballad to break up the later portion? Will it be Ukraine to get it over and done with (or will they get the Slot #2 curse to avoid the stress of having to find somewhere to host it next year)? Will it be something like Norway to keep people invested? I have no fucking clue.

I saw a theory on Twitter that basically suggested the jury and televote rankings were polar opposites so you got the absolute highest of each and then the rest were the filler acts that didn't really impress anyone. But I suspect it was probably the same kind of situation we had in the final last year that led to the nul point massacre - Ukraine and to a lesser extent Moldova and Norway hoovering up the televotes, so everyone else was fighting for scraps, and because the juries were more evenly divided the acts they liked better ended up with higher overall scores and qualified in the sixth-tenth range. The one that fascinates me most here is Lithuania. Like I knew the song was coming and I liked it, but you could genuinely tell me it finished in any position between second and tenth in this semi and I would believe you. It's obviously not a normal year - both with the whole Ukraine situation and with the broken sun killing half the stagings - but it was the only one in this semi that felt like it'd be a winner contender in different circumstances.

I object to Latvia not qualifying.

I'm sure it was a total coincidence that, after being absent from the show for nearly a decade, Zumbo happened to turn up for a Pressure Test with the only two people here who've done one of his pressure tests before and have exploitable trauma from it. Total coincidence. (He was in two episodes of season three but Michael won the right to skip the challenge both times, did the weird centrepiece team challenge in season four - where Mindy was partnered with Andy, as it happens - then hasn't been on the show since that boring Professionals season. They've done something like 600 episodes since the last time he was here.)

Because she'd never "joined the circus" in her career. (She did the UK Celebrity Big Brother a couple of years ago, so it's not even true.)

Taking this Gish Gallop one point at a time: In seven seasons, we've never had a Rudy Giuliani on the show before. This goes back to the argument about whether respect is automatic - there was no chance any of them were going to "but I really need to pee!" to get away from a Gladys Knight or a Tom Bergeron. Rudy, because of his history, is a different kettle of fish. Ken is an actor. Making a show is quite literally his job. The reasons producers would want a contestant on the show (talent, controversy, big names) are different from the reasons producers would want a judge on the show (improv ability, pop culture awareness, regular availability). To say that the reasons they hired Ken seven seasons ago are identical to the reasons they got Rudy for this season is incredibly disingenuous. Ken's job on this show is not "sit idly by while things happen around you", it's "make the best and most interesting television program you can". I would argue he did exactly that by leaving; we're certainly spending more time talking about it than many past episodes. Television is a collaborative medium. While producers are responsible for the final decision making, there is not one person who gets to be all "this is what we're doing, if you don't like it, you leave". The closest is the network censors, who wouldn't give a flying fuck about this. Also producers tend not to be whiny babies; in this case, they probably congratulated themselves for making a water-cooler moment rather than worrying about being disrespected. I agree that this shouldn't be about politics. I'm a little curious why you'd instantly follow that up by mentioning a case that wound up being very politically loaded, buuuut in a non-political sense there's a principle in comedy that jokes work when you "punch up" at targets with power and don't work when you "punch down" at people without. It's why jokes about colonialism work better when told by people who aren't British or French, for example, or why that scene from Downfall got turned into a meme instead of any scene from Schindler's List. In your analogy, one group has historically borne the brunt of much of the worst of humanity, while the other really hasn't faced that much since they stopped using the Colosseum for one of its original purposes; here, the dynamic is the other way around, with someone powerful (Rudy; YMMV but that's how the show treated him) receiving criticism from someone (Ken) who's usually there to be The Dumb One. It's a false equivalency. I don't doubt that teachers refusing to teach would face ramifications. There are, however, some jobs where you are ethically bound to help wherever you can regardless of the people you deal with - firefighter, paramedic, police officer, veterinarian, librarian, and so forth - and while "teacher" is one of those jobs, "not quite a judge on something that's not quite a talent show" isn't one of them.

I mean, I guess the general point we're all litigating here is "should respect automatically be given, or should it be earned?" I'd argue that there's a general presumption of respect, sure, but there's also people in this world who clearly have forfeited their right to respect - murderers, pedophiles, the lesser Kardashians, et cetera. I don't know that, given his general buffoonery in recent years and his specific history in relation to a current issue that he as a medical doctor would CERTAINLY have strong opinions on, Rudy isn't in that second group for Ken. I think Ken certainly tried to give him the benefit of the doubt; that's why he sat through the explanation of why he did the show. But once it got to an encore performance that really serves no purpose but to give celebrities some PR for doing the show, Ken decided he just couldn't any more. I respect Ken for that decision, just as I respect Nick for clearly pressing on despite his own personal objections, just as I respect Nicole for being able to put her own baggage aside for three minutes. Ultimately, the fact that Ken gets paid to be here is irrelevant. Sure, it's true that he earns more than most. But even in minimum wage retail, sometimes the customer is right, and sometimes the customer is an irredeemable asshole who needs to Find Out™. If Ken decided the best way he could de-escalate the situation was to go into the hallway outside the studio for a bit, I'm not going to fault him for that.

I mean, sure, Rudy wasn't explicitly there to pimp his views, but it's part of the package with him at this point, and Ken was well within his right to walk out whether people on the internet like it or not. Had Rudy just been the former mayor of NYC who randomly popped up on here for grandkid-related reasons after being out of the spotlight for a decade, I don't think many people would have raised an eyebrow. But that's not what the context here is, and we all know it. And "well, this show has been casting dickheads for a while, so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯!" doesn't excuse them for this latest particular horrific casting choice any more than it excused them from any of the others you mention. The thing here is... like, I don't think it's necessarily a bad thing for them to raid the world of politics for people. Like, they're really not any less "public figure" notable than the D-tier reality fodder we've been getting the last couple of seasons; it's just that the sweet spot between "not famous enough to justify" and "so infamous it's distracting" is a LOT harder to hit with any reliability, and in this case they clearly missed it spectacularly. That's not to say it's impossible (Masked Singer UK had one of Tony Blair's Cabinet ministers a couple of years ago, which seems about right?), just that it's very difficult to find the right balance of all the competing factors, and I don't know that I'd trust any American show to accomplish it successfully.

Most of the favourites already came back two years ago. And I assume Marion and Adam were busy having actual careers still. They had no issue highlighting the judges at the start of All-Stars. Maybe they decided not to undercut the closure of that montage.