Bare chests and treasure chests! / CBS
Our readers (well, Keith, anyway) want to know:
I made the mistake of watching Pirate Master last night. Have you caught it? Thoughts?[Ed: Spoilers deleted, as if anyone on the planet was going to go through the trouble of time-shifting this dud.]
Arrrrr, Keith, I did watch it! My thoughts: I felt like I was watching a Survivor outtakes reel, right down to the shamelessly ripped-off screen-graphics typeface. Does the fact that Mark Burnett was ripping himself off make it any better?
Honestly, I have no idea the exact genesis of the show, but it looked like it was conceived at the opening of a Survivor season, just before the ritual “stranding” of the players, when someone on the crew said, “Hey, wouldn’t it be cool if we just left them on the boat?”
Which, actually, it might have been: say you did an entire season called Survivor: Adrift, in which the tribes had to spend 40 days in the claustrophobic confines of a ship lost at sea. That I’d watch. But take those same Survivors, dress them up in silly costumes, and it becomes like hanging out after showtime with the sixteen dumbest members of an amusement-park revue.
Mark Burnett largely established reality TV as a commercial force in American broadcast TV. Between this and On the Lot, it seems like Burnett is on a one-man campaign this summer to kill it. What say you, mateys?