Celebrity Splash and How Did It Get Here: Or the Day TV Really Gave Up

Celebrity Splash is a TV series, in the same way a hot dog is considered a food. It has the parts of a TV series, it looks like a TV series and we consume it like a TV series but afterwards you feel regretful, wonder what it was made from and why it exists. I had to take a blood test this morning and had a good conversation with the woman taking my blood. After she retracted her fangs, she asked if I saw that "travesty" Celebrity Splash last night and how we even got to this point in television.

I'd seen the billboards, the magazine ads, the TV spots, but the actual show? I reserve my right to actually call out whether or not the show is bad (even with a hotdog comparison). I had better things to do last night, like watch Charmed and Q and A, during it's timeslot. The show from my understanding is to get B and C-list celebrities to confront their fears of actually making it to the top of something in their life before plunging deep into a pool of uncertain liquid, where they are cheered on by a crowd; a perfectly defunct metaphor for their careers. This is only exacerbated by the amount of promotion the celebrities get from just being on the show and the possible endorsements and opportunities they'll get when the show is over..

So how did we get to this point? Well, it all started with the 2012 London Olympics and a Dutchman. Yeah, remember that fun time in 2012 where the entire world was on stage wagging their nationalistic cocks in everyone's face. It was a glorious time where London was showing off how great they were and not any of the other horrible stuff in recent memory, like riots, unemployment or healthcare issues. But even before the Olympics even occurred there was a man by the name of Reniout Oerlemans

Seen here in his battle against the Huns.

The Eyes Have It - A Look into Torrenting, Distribution and Box Office

I read a fantastic article this morning from The Wrap which outlined how Cinedigm, a Los Angeles based distribution and digital content company, were setting up a partnership deal with BitTorrent for their upcoming film Arthur Newman. Now, it's not exactly what you think with the partnership, the film isn't just an indie affair and it's not the whole movie. It's a quaint little drama starring Academy Award Winner, Colin Firth (The King's Speech) and Golden Globe Winner Emily Blunt (Looper) and written by the woman who crafted the Brad Pitt vehicle, Seven Years in Tibet.

Hat sales and Pitt Box Office receipts were at an all-time high in 1997

The film's first seven minutes will be uploaded to BitTorrent exclusively and will be shared with hundreds of millions of users and it's an interesting move to say the very least. There has already been outcries from the film industry with an anonymous film executive telling The Wrap, that it's a "deal with the devil," that "It's great for BitTorrent..disingenuous of Cinedigm" and that "BitTorrent is in it for themselves, they're not in it for the health of the industry." Sure, if you were heavily invested in the film industry and had to look at BitTorrent in a destructive and subjective manner. Also if you are severely worried about the implications a technological divide being reached and how people view your fairly archaic way of doing things, then sure.

How The Shire is fixing Australian TV

During my travels in Finland, I found myself keeping up to date with everything I could via Twitter and News.com.au. Mainly because I don't speak Finnish, the news was easier to swallow and a lot easier to read on my phone or laptop but my favourite international news experience was when The Shire was trending for the full six hours I was in Tampere.

Yes, I know with sites like this, I shouldn't have been on Twitter and enjoying my holiday.

It originally started when I arrived and found a quick Wi-Fi spot whilst waiting to be served for train tickets and it ended when I checked into an American Steakhouse shortly before heading to Helsinki. Despite the fact I had thought the show was cancelled indefinitely due to the negative backlash of both, the community it was portraying and from entertainment critics alike, The Shire seemed to continue like a Rhinoceros with a head injury.

The Blind Side is da best movei evaraaaar!!!!!1111!?#1!

However, the initial reaction was incredibly negative on both Twitter and Facebook, which made me believe that there may be humanity left in the TV viewing population. At the time of the original airing, I checked Facebook to see two of my friends liking a Facebook post along the lines of "Getting this fuckin shit of my telly", which had a total of over a thousand thumbs up. Actually looking at the official Facebook page for The Shire, there are over fifty thousand people talking about it, but less than ten thousand actually like the show.

I'm sure more people like Question Time than The Shire

The first series of articles seemed to come across in only a negative light but a few more people have been opening up to the show in the past forty eight hours. I finally got to watch an episode and whilst I missed the pilot, I don't think I missed much. To sum up the show, I've never seen such a pure and more concentrated form of vapidity and mediocrity in my life. The amount of skewed morals, meanings and mentoring which takes place in a single episode, is not only frustrating but also inspiring.

Dude, she'd be hawt with Botox

The show's style is not your typical reality show, as the camera switches between carefully prepared situational shots and one on one interviews. For those who initially compared the show to that of MTV's Jersey Shore or the UK's The Only Way is Essex, the similarities could stop from minute one. The show is more akin to Home and Away and it's melodramatic style of storytelling and it's simplistic storylines keeps it in the running for a soap opera category, over light or reality entertainment.

...because there is no unintentional comedy category.

But before I get into why the show is inspiring for aspirational TV writers and TV critics, I will mention the people to blame, Shine Australia. They'd had runaway successes in the last half a decade with shows such as the Australian adaptations of The Voice and The Biggest Loser and The Shire seems like one of their first pieces of original programming, despite the similarities to other formats. I think Shine has made good products in the past and probably at the time of the first unveiling of The Shire, they'd already sunk too much money into it to not run it, but I do wonder how the pitch for that show went down.

So the monkeys are...outside the zoo?

Actually oddly enough if you go to Shine Australia official website, there is not a single mention of The Shire whatsoever. And this is where things get interesting. It seems like everyone wants to distance themselves from the show, excluding the stars. I say stars, but they're more like burnt out lights on a Christmas tree, trying to flicker and stay on, but eventually will be trashed or broken before the week is through. The online reaction is incredibly negative, but it's not just from critics like it usually is, it's from the generation and people who the show is meant to be connecting with and that's what is so positive.

...okay, not that positive.

We've seen the nature of where celebutants like Paris Hilton and Kim Kardashian end up with their famously  TV abbreviated lives and I think Australian audiences, both young and old are not having a bite of it. Taking a look at a great article by TV critic Michael Idato, recaps the show but also let's us in on the ratings for The Shire. He states in an audio recording that the show debuted last week with a pretty nifty amount of people, close to a million and this week, the ratings dropped significantly after people turned over after Masterchef. The show garnered 1.5 million initially, but then things got really bad when the true figures were to be revealed around 750 000.

Which means, more people have seen this than The Shire...which is great.

This is showing a great sliding progression that hopefully will not pick up next week. This is apart of an everchanging cycle of television as we have to remember that Jersey Shore has been running for almost four years and has even spawned a spinoff, The Shire would be lucky to have an episode five. I think the show has more relations to the idiotically popular The Hills, in both style and substance. The Hills ran for six seasons and often focused on the lives of their characters in more of a plot-driven style rather than, let's wait and see who falls over drunkenly first.

Artist Rendering of their Facebook page

Either way, Australian audiences are turning off The Shire and Idato mentions that Australia isn't used to this "soft script" style. I also think the audience it was aimed at was a bit too media savvy to not know when they were being fed something that clearly was not a reality show, at least not in style. Another great article from writer Helen Razer pointed out, regarding the show's backlash that it was "easy to call it 'shallow'...'stupid..." and making fun of "so-called 'bogan'", but the fact remains that "being a snob about The Shire and the people it purports to represent is win-win for critics: it requires no intellectual strain AND it makes us seem especially clever." It makes us feel good to hate this show and that I was initially afraid that people may be hate-watching and hate-tweeting, but with such a drop, I think that the future of Australian TV really is in the hands of the people.

This is why we can't have nice things...

With everything said and done, The Shire did end up 7th on last night's ratings and was sadly probably watched, tweeted and hated a lot more than rank number 19, Q and A. Australian TV isn't bad, it can get better, we just need to watch less of this and more of other things...or someone from TV Land needs to contact me. I got a great pitch about a monkey who spends thirteen weeks living with a typical dysfunctional Australian family.

You can follow me on Twitter and we can talk about The Shire too.

An Interview with Molly Friedrich.

Alright, so several hours ago, I had made quite an interesting discovery on Kickstarter that someone had made a great board game and things didn't go well as planned, to put it lightly. So I decided to do the thing that most people should do if they are official journalists and have hats that say Press and are important and things, I decided to investigate this strange story about Ms. Molly Michelle Friedrich.

Taken from her Kickstarter page.

What I found was something more interesting and less shocking than most people would have assumed for how I painted Ms. Friedrich in the original posting. It garnered minimal attention but was still something I was at least interested in finding more about. I contacted her Kickstarter and also found on her project page, a link to her Facebook Profile. I decided to add her as a friend and hopefully sparked up a conversation.

Now, you have to realise, right now I'm on holiday in Finland visiting family and it's currently the time of the year in Finland where the sun stays up past it's bedtime. I'm meant to be enjoying myself and not writing but I really wanted to do something and I don't know why but this seemed important. I also thought Molly may never add me or that she might get back to me in the morning, but within a few hours, I was hearing back to her and I began to realise how real this situation this was.

So I decided to conduct an interview with Molly Friedrich to get her side of the story.

The following is a cleaned up version of a Facebook conversation. Links were edited in HTML and none of the sentences have been taken out of context. The italics are the conversation and the regular text is my interjections, clearly destroying the flow of the story and changing the situation as you read it.

HE: Hi Molly,

I just read about your Kickstarter card game and I'm wondering how the project is going and if you have any updates.

Thanks again, HE

Molly Friedrich: 

Hi, 

the design is finished. J

ust trying to work through a printing issue. O

therwise I have all the supplies and its ready for printing. Y

ou can read the manual here: 

http://porkshanks.deviantart.com/gallery/

Now, I'm going to make a quick stop here to go and look at that link above. Go there, have a look at that art, which is quite fantastic and is actually featured in the upcoming gaming, Katalyka. Now, we continue:

Molly Friedrich: 

and you actually see all the cards here: 

http://porkshanks.deviantart.com/gallery/35357028

HE: 

Is there anything you want to add from your last Kickstarter post?

I was genuinely nervous to ask this question, as I was unsure if the post was something genuine or it may had slipped her mind, as it was over a month ago.

Molly Friedrich: No, new news on printing. The production is still halted until that issue can be resolved.

I tried to be as honest as I could with my approach and I did want to get her side of the story and I did plan to write a follow up, so I was clear on my intentions.

HE: 

I'm writing a story about the Kickstarter project and I'm wondering if I can use these links and what you've said in this conversation for an ending to the piece

Molly Friedrich:

sure.

HE:

Thank you so much 

Molly Friedrich: 

I'm just really frustrsated by this printing issue. I know the game is fun and I want to get it in my customers hands. So feeling trapped like this, is annoying to say the least

I felt I had to at least ask about "the sun" thing, so I guess, I just went for it.

HE: 

Just to add one more thing about you mentioning the sun is obsessing of your game iin your last post and wondering if you're able to elaborate on that at all?

Molly Friedrich:

I feel like the mindset of the game was interesting enough and has some good elements and that something in the collective consciousness (at least here in America) grabbed it as soon as it saw what I was trying to build the game around... and it became the target of some nasty attacks

I was initially confused here but I realised she was still answering my question from before and I'd rudely interrupted.

Molly Friedrich: 

I've talked a lot about this in my journal posts on deviant art

Harrison Engstrom:

THe pork shanks one?

Molly Friedrich:

I was trying to actually resolve this all because I just wanted to use ideas that have been with me for most of my Life in a "fun-to-share" way. Yeah, porkshanks.deviantart.

Okay, now stop what you're doing and go here: http://porkshanks.deviantart.com/journal/?offset=1

Before she even told me about the link, someone on Twitter linked it to me and I didn't think she would bring it up or she would explain it in a different way, but she was clear as crystal about it. Now read a few of them, maybe a whole page.

No, seriously, read a few of the posts and just let that settle in and then continue reading the rest of this conversation. I was going to repost some of it here, but I didn't think people would believe me, if I'd copy and pasted it. Just read it and either you've read it and you think the rest of this conversation may be quite odd, or you are still genuinely interested to hear her side of the story. Of course, I was interrupting again.

HE:

perfect. Do you mind if I quote this conversation for the posting? Nothing out of context, no messing about, of course.

Molly Friedrich:

Everything seemed fine while I was designing the game. It felt really positive and then right after I got it all set and ready it felt like something turned and the whole process became a living nightmare, and I'm still unsure how to cope with that controlling mind.

Yeah I don't mind, if you quote

HE

Anything else you want to add

At this point, I thought, I'd gotten everything and that maybe things had just gotten out of hand and I just wanted to finish the interview up, but she had more to say and like a good interviewing, I should have kept my mouth shut and just listened.

Molly Friedrich

I'm sorry that the people who paid for the game already dont have a copy yet and I dont want to give up on them, in spite of this taking longer than I wanted. I have all the supplies, so aside from printing the cards its ready. Boxes, labels, dice, all of it.

HE:

Thank you very much Molly.

Molly Friedrich

Sure. What are you writing for?

The jig is up! Everyone head for the woods. I decided to be honest.

HE:

I'm writing about it on my blog. I was initially harsh about what had happened with the debacle due to a thread on Reddit, but I'm glad I have your side of the story now 

Molly Friedrich: 

Okay, thanks. I don't blame people for being frustrated, I feel the same way

HE:

I was quite dickish in my initial thoughts, but it's pretty much all cleared up and I'll make sure there are links to your deviant art to make it easier for people.I can't wait to see the game made. I even mention it in the piece I'm writing. It looks incredible. Thanks again, I'll make sure people hear your side of the story now.

Molly Friedrich:

That was part of the mind that wants to keep me from communicating the ideas in the philosophy of the game. This part is hard to explain, but the idea of the game is that entire star systems are meant to work as a unified whole with a common long term goal, and that is very threatening to something out there, and the more I learn about this (Please read my latest journal entry to see what I mean) the more this argument I'm in seems to be pointing to some rather huge things happening.

It still kind of feels surreal to me to be caught in the middle of this... I was taken by surprised by it

thats about all I wanted to say. Thanks for asking my side

HE:

A lot of people were surprised by your post and I do hope nothing awful happens in the future. I do wish you the best.

Molly Friedrich

I promise I never set out to rip people off. I still think this may partially be a miscommunication on some level.

And I said more thank you's and goodbyes and I want to make it clear, I am not the good guy in this scenario. I felt guilty and also curious about who this person was and what they were doing and whilst some people may see her as a charlatan, I think she just underestimated the amount of pressure and work it took into making a full board game.

I was quick to judge her post as somewhat mental and she was more than kind enough to speak with a total stranger and explain her situation but in the end, Molly is who she is and now what I wrote and will not take down. I learnt and I investigated and I'm glad I did what I did.

Molly Friedrich is just a struggling board game developer who made a post about "the sun" harassing her and that's what she believes. She has different ideas and thoughts compared to you and I but she's still trying to make a game and she's going to in the end. Just give her some time.

Thanks again to Molly Friedrich for the interview. Her game Katalyka is still in production and will be finished when she gets that printing error sorted.