Thursday, June 22, 2006

Treasure Hunters Searching in Vain for Watchable Television

I was warned. Really. In The Washington Post on Saturday, a review ran of the new show Treasure Hunters. In fact, Tom Shales’ exact words were: “Fortunately, typical viewers are armed with a necessity of their own: the marvelous, wonderful channel-changer, with which they can effortlessly transport themselves to a location preferable to "Treasure Hunters" -- specifically, any channel not airing it.” Yikes.

Within a few minutes, I could see why. Aside from the fact that the beginning of the show played like an infomercial (really, do we need to know which website they will be using on their laptops?), the quality of the show was terrible. I could have done a better job hosting. Heck, you could have done a better job.

I so wanted to like the show – the whole idea of solving clues and hunting for treasure sounds interesting. But it turns out to just be a low-rate version of The Amazing Race. So 25 minutes in (that’s right, I gave it 25 minutes), I gave up. Now, to put this into perspective, I watched the entire season of Unan1mous earlier this year, and watched Paradise Hotel with a passion. Twice (they re-ran it on Fox Reality…go figure…). I guess Tom Shales was right.

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