Splash Season Premiere: Despite Trying a Sports Angle, Splash Bellyflops

This show is stupid. That’s what I said when i was first forced to watch

Dancing With the Stars

a few years ago. But I gave it a chance because a person of the opposite sex was asking me to do it and there were football players on the show. How much more convincing does a guy really need? But after watching the show, I got pulled right in because it’s actually a really entertaining show. From the difficulty of the dancing to the live aspect of the show, Dancing WIth the Stars truly is one of the more entertaining shows on television and without a doubt one of the best reality shows currently airing.

So naturally, ABC is going to try and extend that viewership with a similar show but with a different angle — an angle with a splash. But as entertaining an idea it is to watch celebrities and athletes try to perform Olympic dives, the novelty wears off very quickly and the show is exposed for what it is: this is a stupid show.

For starters, it’s not live. They claim it’s live by constantly referencing their “live audience” but it’s no more live than the studio audiences present at the tapings of Big Bang Theory or any other sitcom ever created. One of the biggest pulls to the show was the fact that we get to see people who shouldn’t be diving doing dives live. If it’s not live what the hell is the point of watching for an hour? What makes Dancing With the Stars a good show is it’s class — DWTS oozes ballroom class and brilliantly teeters the tight rope between being really cheesy and being really high brow entertainment. But Splash feels like something I’d watch on VH1 at 10:30am on a Tuesday. I get that it’s a different format, but it just feels cheap and that’s where it loses most of it’s audience.

Strip the show down to it’s core: it’s sole appeal is to see famous people bellyflop. Once that novelty wears off the show is exposed for what it is, an overproduced ripoff of a better show that feels like a really bad cable reality show. Joey Lawrence is just unbelievably unbearable and he’s the host — that tells you all you need to know about the thought that went into this show.

The contestants are meant to draw in a wide variety of audiences, as it has NBA Hall of Famer Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, NFL “bad boy” Ndamukong Suh and Miss Alabama Katherine Webb. Right off the bat we get to see what kind of show this is going to be when Webb is asked why she’s famous and she lists her reasons as being the subject of Brent Musburger’s fantasy, A.J. McCarron’s girlfriend and being Miss Alabama.

That brings us to our next point: there are 10 contestants but we only get to see five of them dive. The logic behind that is so manically condescending it’s sickening. Somewhere, network executives assumed that this show would be so insanely popular that they don’t even have to show us a full show and we’ll still eat it up. American’s are idiots and American’s who absorb reality television are even stupider but even those people know a bad idea when they see it.

There’s no drama, there’s razor thin novelty and the tape delay aspect of the show just reeks of the worst kind of reality television today. Splash is far better suited for 1am reruns on the Game Show Network, not the 7pm primetime slot on a Tuesday on national television.

This is a stupid show.