LogFAQs > #901930693

Well, another season is over, and it was a bad one. Really bad. I have placed it in my rankings and it's low. Really low. I won't give an exact placement because I do hope we do a conglomerate ranking again this summer, but I will say that it is sub-30.

And this morning, for the first time ever, I began to seriously question if I wanted to continue watching the show. The thought briefly dashed across my mind at the end of last season, but this morning I actually genuinely began to play with the thought.

Here's the thing - the show has gone downhill over the past few years, with the occasional good season popping up now and then. We've had strings of bad seasons like this before (22-26 with 25 being good comes to mind), but those were just bad seasons, whether they were bad casts, bad decisions by the producers, poorly edited, or a combination. Those happen on a case-by-case basis, and we just happened to have a bunch of them in a row. The reason the most recent seasons have been bad is because the show itself has changed. For the worse, and as far as I can tell, permanently. Casting is no longer concerned with finding the best people for TV, they are looking for people who fill certain obligatory racial, sexual, social, economic, and geographic quotas AND will conform to the "script" of the show if you will, with one or two "characters" per season. The editors are no longer concerned with telling a coherent narrative for the season that explains why people won and lost, they just want to show off big flashy moves and dramatic moments.

Jeff and Mark believe they have found the perfect formula for the show and how every season from here on out ought to be presented, and in my opinion it is a bad formula. Yes, I want to see flashy moves, yes I want dramatic moments, but I also want to know the characters. I want to see the relationship between Wendell and Sebastian develop. I want to see how Angela struggles socially. I want to know who the fuck Chelsea is. I want funny little moments that we used to get. Just one-off conversations that had nothing to do with the game and just showed two humans bonding over something that the audience could either laugh or cry over.

You can tell how dedicated they are to sticking to this formula by how much they have changed about the show in just the past three years - Every season needing to have a "twist" or "theme" that it gets named after. The endless twists and turns that they throw at the contestants every Goddamn episode. The bullshit new F4 format. No more individual jury speeches and instead they have to follow all but a strict script. The reunion shows only actually talking to like 5 contestants. And these are all format changes to the show itself. Somebody who watched up through, I don't know, season 12, would come back today and find the show completely unrecognizable. And these changes are likely irreversible. This is the way the show is going to be presented for the foreseeable future, and in my opinion, the pattern of "one good season every few years" is going to be the standard from here on out.

CONTINUED
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darkx
Top hopefuls for Smash 5: Isaac, Shantae, Travis, Toad, Takamaru, Octolings, Ashley, Waluigi, Zael, Fleming, Stylist, Snip & Clip