Hang onto your blood-pressure meds:
David Schwimmer is staring. Ben Affleck is thinking. Don Cheadle is pausing. Kevin Pollack is doing Christopher Walken.
And just when you figured your systolic/diastolic numbers on the ol' BP couldn't flip out any further …
David Schwimmer is blinking. Ben Affleck is frowning. Don Cheadle is mulling. Kevin Pollack is doing William Shatner.
This, we are told, is "The Next Big Bravo Thing!"
Try The Next Big Pharmaceutical Thing. A better corrective for high blood-pressure short of a heart stoppage no physician could prescribe.
Bravo's Celebrity Poker Showdown—taped at The Palms—is one of the most inert hours of television since the test pattern. Let series set in other cities be this jaw-droppingly dull. In Sin City, the biggest sin is boredom, and Celebrity Poker Showdown is fast earning a trip to the confessional.
Laying a shaky bet that any programming preceded by the "C" word is its own justification in a country where Paris Hilton is more recognizable than any Democratic presidential candidate not named Howard Dean, Celebrity Poker Showdown is produced by avid player and Rob Lowe-replacement Joshua Malina of The West Wing. (Which explains this week's all-WW tourney, as well as the involvement of The Queer Eye Channel, fast becoming The West Wing Rerun Channel.)
What Malina has wrought is an hour with nothing at stake, and—once the celebrity sheen (Martin or otherwise) dims—no reason to care.
The celebs play Texas hold 'em for their favorite charities, a philanthropic game-show tradition. But poker isn't Jeopardy or Family Feud. It's raw, financial blood sport, personal fortunes riding on any given raise or call. That's the high-voltage crackle of ESPN's coverage of the World Series of Poker at Binion's, and the Travel Channel's World Poker Tour, where fleshy, vaguely frightening men with stained baseball caps, imperfect teeth and stony stares watch their wallets inflate, deflate or disintegrate with every hand.
But on CPS, every charity walks away with fatter coffers, win or lose. That leaves a match with all the sweaty tension of Go Fish, with celebrities feigning competitiveness and encouraging play more capricious than strategic to keep us entertained.
The result—even with cameras eyeballing everyone's cards—is neither sport nor entertainment, but static stargazing.
As host/actor/impressionist Pollack readily exclaims while "consoling" the losers in the so-called Losers Lounge, "there really are no losers here," reinforcing CPS as an exercise in the masturbatory arts. Pollack, whose role could be handled by a Don Pardo knockoff, gently mocks the "loser's" play and commiserates over their lousy luck, triggering stunning celebrity admissions and wails of regret, such as Allison Janey's: "Oh, well, whaddaya gonna do?"
Next, they'll tell us they can win it all if they can just avoid injuries.
Poker pro/co-host Phil Gordon has genuine insight to offer, but gets few opportunities. CPS is too taken with its faux-celebrity bonhomie to be bothered with actual poker.
With its competitive excitement stillborn, the CPS debut, with Schwimmer, Affleck and Cheadle joined by CSI Miami's Emily Procter and Sex and the City's Willie Garson, could barely generate any watchable camaraderie. The all-West Wing crew was marginally more fun if only to see the President of the United States as First Loser.
Celebrity Poker Showdown is amateurish and giggly—as intoxicating as a scotch on the rocks, hold the scotch.
The tele-poker phenomenon—which fizzled in fictional form on FX's short-lived Lucky (the John Corbett series painted a Vegas too dark and moody for a city sold to the masses as a hedonist's Day-Glo dreamscape)—has been a surprising boomlet to basic cable.
World Series of Poker nailed down an average 1.25 million viewers for ESPN during its initial eight-week run, improving over a meager 408,000 viewers in the same time slot a year earlier. And The Travel Channel's floating World Poker Tour nearly tripled its viewership. But Time magazine writer Josh Tyrangiel got it right when he cracked, "Imagine how many people would have tuned in if they knew there was a Travel Channel."
Filmed card games, even gussied up with hidden lipstick-cameras, nattering experts and hosts, and miscellaneous techno-flotsam, are too inherently static to generate the broad appeal networks feed off of. Though that hasn't stopped the mildly panicky NBC—absent pro basketball, football or baseball on its schedule—from striking a deal with the Travel Channel to produce a poker tourney on Super Bowl Sunday, opposite CBS' day-long drone of pre-game shows. Of course, sports-anemic as NBC is—and with ratings expectations nearly nil against the gridiron behemoth—Peacock programmers stand to lose little on this gamble.
Because cloning is the sincerest form of television (the late Dolly the sheep could have run UPN), the Game Show Network has announced plans for The World Series of Blackjack.
Even better: Fox is green-lighting a celebrity spelling bee.
And now your host … Dan Quayle?
Steve Bornfeld's column is open 24/7 for your dining and dancing pleasure. Reservations: [email protected]