BUT WHERE'S BILLY BATSON?  I wanted to talk a little bit about the mess that is Beat Shazam.  There are two cores to a successful game show:

1. The game itself has to be easily explainable and understandable.  The show actually passes this test, unlike other recent "big game" efforts like Million Second Quiz or 500 Questions.  Choose the correct name of a tune fastest, and score points.  Team with the highest number of points at the end of the main game goes on to play a bonus game with a similar format.
2. The star of the show is the game itself and the contestants playing it.  This is where the show collapses.  Jamie Foxx is a likable screen presence, but he makes it all about him, rather than about the game or the contestants.  Add to this that he has basically negative chemistry with his co-hostess, whose function seems to be to press a button to start each song, and you've got serious problems.

Magnifying that problem is that the program is seriously padded, and much of that padding, Foxx is called upon to fill during.  Outside of the bonus game, there are 25 song clips (none exceeding about 5 seconds) in an episode, leaving the show with 30+ minutes of non-play content to fill in a 44 minute episode.  Much of this is unneeded gameplay elongation--"let's see who got it right" (long pause), "now who got it right fastest?" (long pause)--though to their credit, there's very little "we'll find out...after the break!"  The basic Name That Tune game is solid, but this is a 22 minute stretched to 44 minutes, and that's not something you want to see.

I-N-E-V-I-T-A-B-I-L-I-T-Y:  Unless y'all convince me otherwise, I don't quite see how it makes sense to do what would otherwise be a fifteenth annual Spelling Bee liveblog on the blog itself, as opposed to offering commentary on Twitter where people actually are.

Yes, there's a part of me that wants to treat the Bee as an annual Brigadoon, the one week a year that a mass audience would return again to this site (seriously, we had tens of thousands of views each day, and not just during our Special Special Guest years), but it strikes me as more stubborn than realistic to insist upon remaining with this platform.

The whole point of the Bee blog was to create a community of Bee enthusiasts to talk about some amazing kids, and ornery words, in real time. We can do that anywhere. Yeah, the 140 character limit is a pain, compared to a lot of the longform stuff I've been so proud to publish here, but if folks don't come here to participate, what's the point?  At least, that's my gut reaction as to how things would play out if we tried to centralize things here next week. Shonda, 2013:

What I love about the Bee is its celebration of intelligence.  The Bee at its best is a dance party for braininess, a nerdgasm for smarty-pants.  The Bee is home for those of us who maybe can not throw a ball or run without our inhalers.  The Bee is a place for people who like to read, who enjoy math, who love science and art and geography and words, words, words.  The Bee is for people who have plans that do not include being a Real Housewife of Anything.   The Bee is the only way our people will ever be on ESPN.   And that makes the Bee awesome.

THE NOW FUN LEAGUE is loosening its rules on post-touchdown celebrations.  Taunting is still bad, but group celebrations are now kosher.