DON'T CALL MY GAME 'STUPID': That's what Mark Cuban said in evicting the first contestant from The Benefactor, but when you start off by gazing at a bank of monitors hooked into hidden cameras to spy on the contestants like you're Billy Baldwin in Sliver and you actually air a contestant saying "When the tower collapsed, I tried to look sorry" just a few days after the 9/11 anniversary, then, well, your game's stupid.
(Yes, the contestant had just finished a game of Jenga, but still . . . )
Cuban doesn't give us any reason to care about him, so his eviction decisions aren't interesting, just arbitrary. I mean, why kick out the loser of a game of Jenga rather than the guy who's acting like the biggest asshole ever while playing against her? At least when Trump axes someone, it's because of some sense of who's got the best business potential. Here, it's just weird.
Roger Ebert has often quoted Gene Siskel as saying that you know a movie's bad when you'd rather watch a documentary of the actors hanging out than of the movie they made. Here, I'd rather watch two random people play Jenga for an hour than the whole show built around it.
Indeed, one step better: why not move past Celebrity Poker Showdown to Celebrity Board Games? Basically, bring back Win, Lose or Draw and expand it to Celebrity Connect Four, to Celebrity Monopoly, Celebrity Scrabble and, hey, why not Jeremy Piven, Laura Innes, Wanda Sykes and Norm McDonald in Celebrity Sorry?
edited to fix Siskel attribution.
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