A List Of Things Thrown Five Minutes Ago

YOU'RE FROM MEMPHIS AND YOU DON'T KNOW WHO WROTE GONE WITH THE WIND? Adam may not have had a chance to watch "The Scholar" yet, but I did. First, the good--the concept remains great, and the casting, as you'd expect from a Jon Murray production, is nicely demographically diverse in terms of race, gender, geography, and personality type. But the show has some serious, serious, problems:

• The casting: Yes, they did great on the whole "diversity" thing, but I'd rather they have something other than traditional "top student" types. Throw in a few underachiever folks and folks who aren't the very tip top of their class but who have specific talents. 10 brownnoser-types just aren't all that interesting. One of the things I loved about the Academic Decathlon program was that you had to find not just "A" students, but also students with lower GPAs. Those underacheivers were where teams won and lost.
• The challenges: It can be fun to work a cryptogram or do a logic puzzle. It's not particularly fun to watch someone else work a cryptogram or do a logic puzzle. Challenges need to be designed to make good TV, including having a "play-along" value, as much as to assess the candidates' intellectual acumen. Want to see how to do this? Old episodes of "The Mole" were almost always brain games, but made much better TV than "figure out how these lights are connected." ("The Mole" also featured Anderson Cooper, who's one of the most underappreciated reality show hosts ever.)
• Show structure: Without eliminations until five weeks in, when the axe falls for five competitors, there's not really a lot of tension or investment in the players, especially in the first few weeks. Everyone's going to get four more chances to be a finalist, and where's the tension in that? In addition, the teams have no real incentive to win their challenges, since only the team leader directly benefits from a team win. For instance, let's say Davis (who appears to be generally loathed among the players) is again a Captain--what's in it for the team members not to sabotage him so he doesn't get a second chance? It's easy enough to fix--create a reward for every member of the winning team (say, $10,000 in scholarship money) so there's an incentive to win as a team rather than just turn in a great individual performance.
• No catchphrase: As I've observed before, the truly great reality shows generally have their episode ending catchphrase--"The tribe has spoken!," "You're fired!," "Either you are in or you are out," etc. We got nothing here.
• Hosting/Paneling: The three "admissions officers" that make up the Scholarship Committee are bland, bland, and bland. This renders the "Committee deliberation" segment bland. Have them pick favorites and advocate for them rather than just sit around a table and say "yes, yes, no, yes." And the host is this guy, who's just not flying. Personality matters in a host--you have to make the balance between being a strong enough personality to guide while not overpowering the contestants and panelists. Nelson errs far too much on the "fade into the background" side.

It's by no means a complete failure. The idea's good and the kids are personable. It just could have been so much more. Next week is going to be interesting, since it looks like they're doing a "non-academic" challenge. My structure would have been for those sorts of challenges to be reward challenges, and have academic challenges determine immunity.