Tonypitt

At this point, does anyone think this show will ever come back? It certainly will have lost any positive momentum it had with fans.

Marcus berating then at the event in front of a crowd of people because he didn’t like his sponsorship sign was a “jump the shark” type moment for me. It was like he was looking for a reason for drama and latched onto something silly. His expectations seemed off, and regardless of how poorly they did, yelling at them about it in front of “their people” did no one any good. This episode was a train wreck from start to finish.

I started watching this show a few months ago and have enjoyed watching the episodes up until the recent ones. Dino was a total train wreck, but I did think that Marcus did go out of his way to 'poke the crazy'. There's no way he didn't know that the "focus group" was a pretty useless technique and would drive the guy crazy. He did it to provoke a reaction. And I call foul on the whole setup related to working with Fabio. Despite their intent to make things seem spontaneous, this is a TV show. My bet is that they knew the guy wasn't coming and Marcus calling him to see where he was just played into the storytelling. Unless I missed something, nowhere in the episode did they say that anyone from the pizza place reached out to the show. As others have noted above, drive through pizza isn't exactly the cure for penicillin. I wonder if there's something in the contracts for the show that specify that if Marcus visits the business for an "insiders look" that he cannot go into competition with them. If Marcus really thinks drive through pizza is a great idea (I guarantee he doesn't), he'd be better off to do it himself without any of the people from the episode. They bring nothing to the table at all.

I thought Barbara's logic for not focusing too much on Halloween was good--why are you putting your new product up against a whole market full of competitors? But then she suggested Christmas instead. At that point I couldn't figure out what she was trying to achieve.

Surprise Ride should be targeting grandparents. For those who have the budget, I could see I being a great recurring gift that would be both fun and educational. I thought the other businesses seemed rather shaky. I especially don't get Beat Box. I'm not in their target market, but it seems like it would be hard to acquire or keep customers given that there seems to be no single serving option. Customer acquisition costs would likely be pretty high, and my guess is that those customers would only be with you for a few years.

I have a friend who had a liver transplant. His donor was a sibling, so the genetic match was good. His recovery was excellent, but so unlike this show that it took me out of the story. Frank would still have weeks of initial recovery ahead and then the first whole year thereafter would have challenging elements. No way he could campaign at all. He'd still have tubes and other not fun things to deal with at this point.

Those two guys were annoying! I'm betting that a lot was cut that couldn't be aired. I was tired with all the 'ball' jokes. It was not funny the first time. By the 50th time I was ready to claw my ears. I'm starting to think this show has an even lower completion rate than Shark Tank. I'm wondering if any of the deals actually play out the way they're supposedly presented on TV. Tim totally tanked that offer. His demand for 80% of the restaurant and then "we'll negotiate" the co-packing probably would have left them with less then 10% ownership of that. He just didn't want anything to do with them. I think the idea might make sense for retail but could not survive as a restaurant. I can't imagine that the food was very healthy, and it just isn't going to resonate with people. ("Let's go have rice balls for lunch!")

I figure that one was a nonstarter because they couldn't accommodate the concept in the "restaurant" facility they have. Along those lines, it seemed to me that in prior seasons they were in some kind of actual storefront location. This season seems to be on a soundstage or similar facility, no?

Really annoying episode. Seemed like the guy's main appeal for the investment was "My wife took my last place and I really, really deserve this." Didn't like him from the start. Neither place seemed worthy.

They kind of did that with the show The Next Iron Chef. I enjoyed that show. Too bad they don't need any more iron chefs.

For some reason Food Network seems to like these shows that seemed designed to deemphasize good food for the sake of drama. I enjoy Chopped (although I stopped watching it regularly some time ago), but I refuse to watch Cut Throat Kitchen even though I really like Alton Brown. It seems to me that if you really were looking for the next Food Network Star, the last thing you'd want to do is run him/her through a gauntlet of activities that would serve to make them look bad. I wish they'd give them relevant challenges with appropriate time to prepare. But then they'd deemphasize the drama, which is what they seem to be after. I've seen this same evolution with Project Runway (Not sure if it's even still on. I stopped watching mid-season a couple of years ago.) and somewhat with Top Chef (Although TC seems to dialed this back and gotten back to it being more about the food and less about the drama).

This show missed an opportunity to be epic. Giada should have worked really, really hard to convince Michelle that she wanted to stay. Then, when Michelle agreed, Giada could have said "Too bad. You've been eliminated." I would have been a Giada fan forever. Yes, I'm in a bad mood tonight. Can you tell?

I'm still trying to figure out the tech on this show. Joe is selling them off-hour compute time on a corporate mainframe. How exactly is that supposed to help their gaming company? Do we assume that most of their business is at night (reasonable) and that during the day they still run things on the home-based systems? More importantly, is there a modem farm somewhere in that computer room of Joe's? I can't imagine why they'd have that. In the Internet era, this might make sense, but in the dialup era, it's all phone lines and modems. I have yet to figure out how time on a mainframe is supposed to be helpful. And, as noted, apparently both ends of the coax had magic on them, because there's no way they whipped up an Ethernet based network from nothing in an afternoon. Joe's prescience is becoming a bit annoying. I keep waiting for him to say something like, "In the future, people will walk around with computers in their pockets that can take pictures and connect them to everyone else on the planet." Just once I'd like to hear him say something totally wrong. "In the future, people will communicate with computers via talking Gerbils. Cats will be system administrators. All large data centers will be in zoos because the animals are so good with Unix programming."

I was glad to see a flop episode! I think this show has done the audience a disservice by not showing more of these. I get that they start filming well before the final transaction, so maybe it really is just the luck of the "draw." One thing that I think is interesting is that they often talk about the amount paid for closing costs. Given that they are both realtors, I'd assume that they are really only paying a buyer's agent commission. So, even in close situations like this recent "flop," I bet they still broke even overall.

I wondered that as well. They are taking a lot of heat for the episode on their Facebook page. If they did that, they should have owned up to it. There's one or two replies from whoever runs their Facebook page that is vague but definitely doesn't acknowledge the fakery (or reconstruction). Let's hope this wasn't a jump the shark episode.