By By Samantha Nwaoshai
Where has all the good television gone? Sometimes all this bad television could make one opt to read a book. VH1 and the “Celebreality” shows are not helping. Through this semester alone, VH1 has made viewers sit through “The Surreal Life,” “Breaking Bonaduce” and “My Fair Brady.” If that was not cringe-worthy enough, VH1 pops out a new one-“But Can They Sing?”
So, what is the premise of “But Can They Sing?”? Well, get this, it’s C-List Celebrities singing. The audience votes for the performance they like best (note, they didn’t say it was based on talent) and the person with the least votes is kicked off. There is also an “expert” panel that trains the celebrities on vocals and choreography in addition to adding their own two cents. It seems like VH1 must have had a meeting of some sort where somebody said, “We need something like American Idol.” Someone else must have said, “Auditioning people searching for real talent is a pain.” It’s like celebrity karaoke and “American Idol” birthed a mutant television show.
The show has so many reasons to be the top of the “bad reality show” cake for VH1. First there are the celebrities on the show. VH1’s C-List for this show includes: Carmine Gotti Agnello, Morgan Fairchild, Bai Ling and Antonio Sabato Jr. The host is Ahmed Zappa, who seems to host almost every bad music show cable networks can come up with. If that isn’t bad enough, there’s the singing. If you are looking for new talent, then keep looking. Looking for decent singers on “But Can They Sing?” is like looking for virgins in the maternity ward.
The show encourages a cornucopia of physical responses, ranging from embarrassment to uncontrollable laughter to repulsion. Viewers will experience each at least once during a single episode. Let’s take the recent “Duets” episode, for example.
The show opened with a duet from Carmine Gotti and Bai Ling, singing (butchering is more accurate) “Summer Nights,” from the movie Grease. As Simon Cowell would say, it was “wretched.” The only way for any human being to enjoy the performance would have required large amounts of Nyquil.
This performance was then followed by a duet between Michael Copon and Larry Holmes, singing “Don’t Go Breaking My Heart.” Guest judge Ant responded with something along the lines of, “It’s not my heart that’s breaking, it’s my ears.”
The final performance for the duets portion of the show featured Morgan Fairchild and Antonio Sabato Jr., who sang the theme from Dirty Dancing, “(I’ve Had) The Time of My Life).” The singing wasn’t half bad. Both Fairchild and Sabato have the most aesthetically pleasing voices on the show. (Not that there is a lot to choose from.)
After this, it was time for the elimination. Voting works almost the same way as “American Idol.” Viewers call and vote for their favorite performer two hours after the show airs, or log in to VH1.com and vote. Who sucked so badly that America decides to vote that person off? Let’s go over who it couldn’t be.
It couldn’t have been Gotti, he was in first place. This is obviously not based on his singing abilities, it’s because he’s a Gotti. Guest judge Ant described his voice as sounding like a “cat caught in a muffler.” Especially after he did his rendition of Usher’s “U Remind Me.”
It definitely wasn’t Bai Ling. Pretty much every performance, she ends up in some form of undress. She sounds like a screeching cat in a blender, but because she doesn’t wear very much clothing, people vote for her. At some point she’s going to end up pulling her own version of “Nipplegate.”
Who eventually got kicked off was Larry Holmes. It wasn’t his singing that kicked him off, but rather his lack of “starpower.” He just wasn’t as compelling as Gotti and Ling, but he gave it his all. That’s all you can do sometimes.