TV News: Just a lot of death. Apparently famous people don’t die in threes, but in clusters. Just in the last few days we lost Dame Maggie Smith (Downton Abbey, Harry Potter), John Astin (Beverly hills Cop), Kris Kristofferson (A Star Is Born), Dikembe Mutumbo (NBA Superstar, and commercial star), and Gavin Creel (a prolific Broadway talent). That’s not a rule of three. Rest in peace to all.
TV Shows Watched: The Penguin: S1E2 (MAX) with audio description, The Summit: S1E1 (Paramount Plus) with audio description, Creature: S1E1 (Netflix) with audio description, Nobody Wants This: S1E5 (Netflix) with audio description, mrMcMahon: S1E5 (Netflix) with audio description, and Have I Got News For you: S1E3 (MAX) no audio description.
Podcasts: Coutdown With Keith Olbermann (Politics), and The Official Penguin podcast (Recap: S1E2, and interviews with crew).
YouTube: None
Movies: none
So it is one and done for me on The Summit. I’m not big into reality TV, but I’m big into checking out audio description. No. this was the first time I did a review/recap where the project had audio description, but I still graded it unwatchable. The reality series takes a group of contestants and pairs them together in one group. They must all make it to the top to win 1 million. it is somewhere in New Zealand. Obviously, the cast is a range of random people across America. There are rules and challenges. It is just like any other reality show.
Except, the audio description is like a walk in your backyard. there are no stakes. It doesn’t highlight any of the danger, the exhaustion, or why you hear things like “we walk 12 steps and stop for 5 minutes”. there’s a guy who has to tap our in the first 30 minutes because he might be having a heart attack. There’s some brief passing reference to the landscape at the beginning, but as these people are on their journey, every time the audio description has something to offer, it never feels like there are any stakes, but the cast is freaking out.
There’s a rope challenge over a gorge I didn’t even understand. The cast mentioned that they needed to walk across in pairs, and that it would benefit them for the pairs to be the same relative size. But why? And how deep is this gorge? Are they using any safety equipment at all? They sleep in these bags to avoid insects, but insects as a problem are never mentioned in audio description. I don’t know if they’re walking a clean path or through a forest.
The audio description really only gave me those things that pop up on screen when introducing a character. “joe, 37”. That’s it. Otherwise, the audio description felt so bored by what it was describing that it resorted to generic filler description, and did nothing to pull in the viewer. And that’s an absolute shame, because this is the launch of a new reality series. We don’t know if this is the next Survivor or the next Kid Nation. But I do know that blind people trying to follow this will not feel any potential sense of danger, and instead of feeling like this is a challenge so hard that it almost killed someone in the first 30 minutes, it instead feels like a walk in your backyard.
Just a total failure of missing the point of this show.
