More thoughts on My Name is Earl damaging NBC

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I’m not sure what NBC was thinking when they scrapped My Name is Earl in favor of having a line-up of Community, Parks and Rereation, The Office and 30 Rock.

The Office, 30 Rock, and My Name is Earl are all successes with built-in audiences. The My Name is Earl numbers might have been less strong but the show still had an audience. The president at NBC reportedly had difficult calls to make on Chuck and My Name is Earl and Chuck won him over because fans had a strong write-in campaign. They apparently mailed him Subway sandwiches. That’s the way to run a network?!

My first complaint is why are TV networks so oblivious to everything but Nielsen ratings? Just look up TV guide or Entertainment Weekly and see how often people are writing praises for My Name is Earl as opposed to a show like Yes, Dear or Two and a Half Men. Go to tv.com and imdb.com and see how many people have posted votes or reviews on a series like My Name is Earl. See how active the message boards are. Talk to people. See how many fans of these shows exist on facebook. Look at Q ratings. Look at the volume of My Name is Earl-related twitter messages. Look at traffic on your site. Look at itunes sales and hulu sales. There are so many ready-made substitutes to Nielsen that a network can sell advertisers on. The fact that the network presidents are only looking at Nielsen ratings makes me annoyed at how oblivious to culture they are. It's also worth noting that Nielsen ratings have been thought to be statistically insignificant and are even more faulty in the digital age as people have more options for skipping commercials.

The NBC President’s decision only shows that Chuck has fans were more successful at mobilizing themselves. Chuck fans were a niche group who were strongly devoted to that show, but steady My Name is Earl watchers are more numerous I believe. Judging by the angry responses, I believe they existed as well.

Lastly, My Name is Earl was more important than Chuck because just think how good it would be for NBC to have a solid Thursday night line-up. Remember the days of Must See TV? How many years has NBC actually had 4 good sitcoms in a row and how excited were we as sitcom viewers to stay glued to our TV screens for two whole hours during those years? Remember those disastrous 8:30 shows like Union Station, Single Guy, Jesse, and that animated one King of the Pride? The brief My Name is Earl, Scrubs, Office and 30 Rock was one of the only years in my memory where that two hour block was solid. Scrubs moved networks and Parks and Recreation was worth a shot so the 2 hours were still pretty intact but most people agree that Parks and Recreation has a lot of kinks to rough out for the second season to be watchable.
Community is pretty promising but it could easily not live up to expectations either.

My bet? One of these two shows will bomb and the end result is that you’re only gonna have one and a half hours of comic gold to work with. Then My Name is Earl is going to be sitting there looking like a pretty attractive option. But, oh wait, you cancelled My Name is Earl and the actors have signed contracts for other things. Won’t you be kicking yourself when that happens?

The annoying thing: I’m not running a TV network but I can easily run it better than someone running a TV network because I see the same thing happening every year. In the meantime, I have to live with the decisions made by incompetent TV network execs.

Reviewing TV shows I've happily watched in the 08-09 season

Covered so far in last Blog Post
Sit Down, Shut Up, Fox
Burn Notice, USA
Important Things with Demitri Martin, Comedy Central
30 Rock, NBC
The Root of All Evil, Comedy Central

Other TV shows I've very much enjoyed watching this past year:
The Office, NBC-The Office certainly raised the bar with the introduction of three new characters on the sidelines and one massive reinvention of the existing dynamic:
-The introduction of Holly. The very sight of a female with as cringeworthy sense of humor was positively shocking.
-The introduction of Charles, who is truly Toby-like in that he represents the exact opposite of everything Michael stands for only he actually has power. Charles didn't just add an odd element into the office which raised the humor. Charles was genuinely scary and created a feeling of suspense. In other words, The Office was no longer just a comedy but a drama. You could have added psuedo action film music whenver Charles and Michael were in a confrontation and it would have fit together decently
-The introduction of Kelly "Erin" Hannon brought a reinvention of the Pam-Jim scenario in the form of Andy & Dwight-Erin, only with far less competent people in the art of romance doing the wooing. Jim and Pam were getting old anyway. I like how the writers on the Office had the audacity to give two characters the same name (I had long been wondering what might happen if a sitcom would ever get two characters with the same name) and then use it as grounds for a joke.
And the reinvention: Michael, Ryan and Pam formed an unlikely trio and all got closer to each other through an episode arc that tore the very safe confines of the show's premise apart. Michael quitting was not just one of the biggest things to happen on the show but it was clearly one of the biggest things to happen in the lives of the characters and the gravity shown through.

It goes to show that the writers of the Office are truly talented because they can move past that intiial spark of lightning to infuse something now.

It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia-FX

Big Bang Theory, CBS

My Name is Earl, NBC



Parks and Recreation-NBC-Parks and Recreation is an interesting show with potential and it's got some talented people in it. Rashida Jones serves as a great counterpoint to the zany characters in the Parks and Recreation department. Tom is an underdeveloped character who could be taken by Azziz Azziznari (don't have enough internet capacity to open up another window and see if I spelt that name right, sorry folks) in so many wonderful directions and having seen Audrey Plaza on the Jeannie Tate show (a web series), you can't wait to see how April's extreme brand will clash with Leslie's manic level of enthusiasm. On the dissapointing end, Amy Poehler has shown on her time with SNL that she can do dozens of characters well but Leslie Knopp isn't one of them. It's worth giving her a chance to develop it, but she's already defined her along such unbelievably buffoonis edges. Was Michael Scott really this bad in his first season at the Office? I'm tempted to say yes, so this is worth a chance too. The other problem with the show is there isn't much of a sense of place. An AV Club review of an episode of Glee noted that shows create a unique sense of place that we go back to week after week. This is highly ironic since Parks and Recreation is about local government, an organization who's existence and vitality is entirely tied to a sense of place. Yet, I know nothing about Pawnee, Indiana. Is it a charming small town? A medium-sized rust belt city? a suburb to something else? A growing yuppie community? The setting effectively serves as the star character in some films and especially TV shows (think futurama, northern exposure, e.r., dawson's creek, etc).

South Park, Comedy Central-This show is something where you take the good and the bad. It's crude and its producers still are stubborn about keeping unneccessary bathroom humor and cheap shots as their trademark even as the rest of their tastes and instincts have matured to points where they're the most effective satirists on TV.

Royal Pains, FX-The show stars TV sitcom regular Mark Feuerstein as Hank, a doctor who had his medical license revoked because he made a triage decision to save a kid against an adult. His brother talks him into taking a trip to the Hamptons and due to a strange paradox that causes medical emergencies to constantly occur in Hank's immediate vicinity (see the TV show Monk for another example of this), it doesn't take long for Hank to show off his mind-blowingly awesome medical skills when a girl at a happening Hamptons' party goes into cardillac arrest. Go Hank! Word gets out so fast about Hank's skills, that be weekend's end he is convinced by his shallow brother (Paolo Costanzo) and an aspiring medical practitioner (Indian actress Reshma Shelly) to open up his own business to cater to the rich clientelle as a "concierge doctor." The show reminds me of Las Vegas or many other shows I haven't seen in that it showcases a world of wealth and blong and we're supposed to be living a fantasy through the characters as they experience this glamorous world. I think Royal Pains doesn't fall into that trap because through the main character, the wealth and consumerism is saterized.

There are a million shows about doctors out there but this is the only one I really like watching. It's one of the few that even interested me enough to want to tune in in the first place and there was a lot to keep me going, once that happened. In the same way that something like Touched by an Angel and Joan of Arcadia serves as entertainment that reaffirms our faith in the world, there's something in Royal Pains that does that too in a very topical way. In the midst of this health care debate, Hank symbolizes what we all need: A doctor who is fully committed to doing good and is willing to put his career on the line for it. Hank is insistent on treating people whether they can pay for it or not despite the musings of his accountant brother who is concerned about the bottom line.

Looking at Guest Star rosters: comedy edition, pt II

Seinfeld: Phil Morris, Teri Hatcher, Armin Shimerman (Star Trek), Bryan Cranston (Malcolm in the Middle), Paula Marshall, Bob Balaban, Patrick Warburton, Marrisa Thomei, Jerry Stiller, Kristin Davis (Sex and the City), A.J. Langer, John Voight, Debra Messing, Lloyd Bridges, Janeane Girafolo

Highlights: Seinfeld has a longer list of guest stars that I could possibly make room to mention here or would even know of without far more extensive research, but it is interesting to note that many comic actors like Phil Morris, Jerry Stiller, Patrick Warburton, and John O'Hurley are most recognizeable through their Seinfeld guest roles. Seinfeld was also lucky to have some of the most attractive ladies in Hollywood (i.e. Paula Marshall, Teri Hatcher, Kristin Davis) playing opposite him. John Voight appeared as himself in one episode and bit Kramer's hand.

Newsradio: Bob Costas, David Cross, Patrick Warburton, James Caan, Brian Poehnson (Sara Silverman Show, Just Shoot Me), John Stewart, Lauren Graham, Jerry Seinfeld, Tiffiany Amber-Thiessen (Saved by the Bell), Kevin McDonald (Kids in the Hall), Scott Adams (creator of Dilbert), Janeane Girafolo, Bryan Callan (Mad TV)

Highlights: Without a doubt, Patrick Warburton and Lauren Graham made the most of their recurring roles. Warburton, in what I think is a very typecast role, plays an extremely affable and friendly evildoer (it all makes sense in Newsradio's bizarro world) and later plays a homeless bum and Lauren Graham plays a prissy efficiency expert who is more concerned with her "best friend" status with Lisa that she conjured than anything else. Before John Stewart was an intellectual icon to college students nationwide, he was Andy Dick's brother on Newsradio in a mismatch of the ages. Lastly, let's not forget that media outlets claiming 30 Rock was Seinfeld's first guest appearance on a sitcom were incorrect. He also played himself on an episode of Newsradio.

My Name is Earl: Giovanni Ribisi, Christain Slater, Norm McDonald, Amy Sedaris (Strangers with Candy), Katherine Kinney (Drew Carey Show), Mike O’Malley (Yes, Dear), John Leguazimo, Ben Foster (X-Men: The Last Stand)

Highlights: Not a lot of stunt casting has taken place on My Name is Earl, because the show doesn't neccessarily need it. Christian Slater is the most high-profile star to appear if this list is as complete as I think it is. Norm McDonald, who can out deadpan anyone on the planet, was incredibly well-used as a bar owner who transforms through the episode from cruel to benevolent and back again without much change in facial expression.

The Office: David Koechner, Conan O’Brien, Amy Adams (Junebug, Talladega Nights), Rob Riggle (SNL, Daily Show), Tim Meadows, Nancy Walls (SNL), Chip Esten (Whose Line is it Anyways)

Highlights: The Office is pretty vehement about avoiding stunt casting because it would take away the reality of the show. When Conan O'Brien appeared as himself in a very brief non-speaking cameo, the only self appearance on the list above, it was because Michael Scott was in New York and the documentarian caught Conan in his lens. However, aside from up-and-comer Amy Adams, and SNL alumni David Koechner and Nancy Walls (Carrell's real-life wife) in recurring roles, guys like Rob Riggle as a fun cruise captain and Tim Meadows as a respective client have added a little bit of star power in one-episode roles.

3rd Rock from the Sun: Wayne Knight, John Cleese, Cindy Crawford, Kurtwood Smith (That 70’s Show), Jan Hooks (SNL), William Shatner, Laurie Metcalf (Roseanne), Phil Hartman, Dennis Rodman, Mike Ditka, Kevin Nealon, Bryan Cranston

Highlights: Cindy Crawford probably tested her acting chops more than ever before as Harry's romantic interest and Wayne Knight enjoyed life comfortable after Seinfeld in this heavily recurring role as Sally's long-time boyfriend.

My Name is Earl picks it up in second season

I think as My Name is Earl hit the homestretch of its second season, it lifted itself from being a decent quirky hit that compliments shows like 30 Rock, Scrubs, and The Office to being a great show itself (note: I wouldn't count 2 of the three shows above as great shows yet although 30 Rock has shown flashes).

"My Name is Earl" works as a quirky no-laugh track show that used to get by on the star power of Jason Lee and the comic gifts of Jamie Pressley. It's storylines have a little humor and that humor is usually balanced by the feel-good aspects of the show. In other words, it's like "Touched by an Angel," only funnier. As of late, however, I think the show has not only been funnier than Touched by an Angel, but it's become funny period and as for the "Touched by an Angel" factor, I think the show has been moving into deeper territory to the point where we're actually caring about the characters' evolution from one episode to the next. It's starting to become dynamic and characters are starting to grow past the requirements of what would make the laughs meaningful within a half-hour episode. Earl is trying to grow up by getting an education and a job and he's taking his brother with him. Jamie is trying to become a mom and like The Office last season, the season finale ended with such a bang of a cliffhanger, it cemented the show as Must-See next year.

Thursday night must-see blog

So I'm watching Thursday's TV night and as I'm watching rather than writing about the youtube thing I was going to write about, I start to want to write a little bit about what I'm watching on TV. I start making notes about the programs that I'm watching and before I know it, I have a whole page or two of incomplete notes, and I figure i'll finish those notes and write about them a little more in detail, so I end up with about 6 pages of notes on NBC's TV programs that appeared from 8-10 p.m. last night.
My Name is Earl last night:
My Name is Earl reminds me that one method of comedy is just to make feel-good stories. There’s a highly oversimplified saying that drama is about the failure of man and comedy is about man’s greatness, so logic suggests that comedy can be successful by capitalizing on its realm of human greatness. Not that all comedy is like that. A great deal of comedy revolves around stupid people, and one of the three elements of comedy according to Plato (no, I’m not making that up) was inferiority. Comedy, however, often capitalizes on a feel-good element that I think is underemphasized in reviews of comedy movies. The two best feel-good movies of all time, arguably, are Frank Capra’s “Mr Smith Goes to Washington” and “It’s a Wonderful Life” and Capra is primarily known as the inventor of screwball comedy. Adam Sandler, for that matter is also a filmmaker who specializes in feel-good stories. (you kno what, maybe I got the saying all wrong about comedy being about human triumph and drama being about tragedy, but who knows.)

-On My Name is Earl, I can’t help but notice that Catalina, the illegal alien who cleans a hotel,” is quite intelligent and well-spoken. This is a very positive portrayal of a Latin American woman in TV. She’s not just the illegal sassy Latin-American sidekick. In tonight’s episode, Joy is confiding to Catalina about a relationship she had with a store manager of Target or something like that because of the discount she get on audio cassettes. When Catalina asks, “You slept with a guy just because of tape decks?” Joy replies, “Well, it was before CDs were invented.” Then Catalina says, “Wait! Didn’t CDs come out in 198-,” before Joy cuts her off in embarrassment. OK, let’s take a moment to consider this: Catallina knew offhand the exact year in which CDs came out and cross-referenced it to Joy’s age to conclude that she was having sex at a really young age. That’s actually pretty hard.

It’s a really small moment, but it is a great one for the positive portrayal of Hispanic people on screen, made all the more remarkable by the fact that My Name is Earl, like most comedies, is a show all about stupid people: Sublimely dumb people who think Karma was created by Carson Daly, and while Catalina has some of that charming stupidity in her (in one episode she said she thought God was a homeless man with an iguana or something), she’s also intelligent and resourceful and has turned out to amount to more than the sum of her initial character traits.

Right now, Ugly Betty is being celebrated for its positive portrayal of Latin American Immigrants amid the Immigration Debate. America Ferrarra’s character and its symbolic ramifications has been written about everywhere from Time Magazine to Newsweek and she was even honored in the congressional records when a member of the House proposed or created a resolution (I don’t know which) honoring her. But it’s often the small things that make a difference in racial perceptions.

Do you think I’m making too big a deal of a small moment? Well, I’m reminded of the textbook I read for my first film class: “Reel to Reel: Sex, Race, and Class at the Movies.” She writes about a very small moment in a film and how that helped destroy a stereotype: “I imagine all the myriad ways in which conventional representations of black people could be disrupted by experimentation. I am equally moved by that moment in Jim Jarmusch’s Mystery Train when the young Japanese couple arrive in the train station in Memphis only to encounter what appears to be a homeless black man, a drifter, but who turns to them and speaks in Japanese. The interaction takes only a moment, but it deconstructs and expresses so much. It reminds us that appearances are deceiving. It made me think about black men as travelers, about black men who fight in armies around the world. This filmic moment challenges our perceptions of blackness by engaging in a process of defamiliarization (the taking of a familiar image and depicting it in such a way that we look at it differently).”

She even goes on to make a strong parallel to my Ugly Betty-My Name is Earl connection by comparing Jim Jarmusch to Quentin Tarantino, the latter of who got more attention for his supposedly “progressive” work.

OK, for a point-by-point blog, I probably should not have dwelled long on that one point but I felt I needed to right all that to make a complete coherent well-thought-out point.

-Sometimes a watch or clock can ruin a TV show. Avoid looking at a watch at all costs while you’re watching TV. In tonight’s episode Randy confesses her love for Catalina and Catalina appears to reciprocate. They hug and everybody claps. The only problem? It’s 8:15 so I know the show’s not going to end, and 5 seconds later it was confirmed that I was indeed correct.

-I really kind of like the Randy-Catalina relationship and where it’s going. I felt that before this episode they could have had a Jim-and-Pam or Niles-and-Daphne thing, where the tension get stretched out forever even though they’re legally married. I felt the ending of the episode took a back turn, because the first two relationships I previously mentioned went years where the characters weren’t together. These two are already married and had sex, so that reduces the tension significantly. What is there left? The two having good sex? Especially considering the show’s lovable innocentness, this is an unusually wrong move by the show to have two characters jump into bed together as a way to move a plot. Remember when the show played with the audience’s perceptions of what we might’ve thought Randy and Joy did when her kids were gone in season 1, through some cleverly concealed shots?

The Office:

The Office is such a great show because it’s so very, very relatable to the point where I want to live vicariously through the characters. Like an Alexander Payne movie, I’m not thinking

It’s kind of the cornerstone of the Must-See Thursday Night TV experience, and it deserves whatever accolades it’s getting. I’m sure because The Office is at the top of the heap, plenty of people are eager to attack it, because people like to attack whatever’s at the top.

The thing I feel like noting this time is there are usually just a couple brilliant moments on The Office each week, that are just pure comic gold. It’s the kind of comic setup and payoff, that you just have to gaze at the TV screen in awe of the comic minds behind it. Here are this week’s top 5 moments:

-That Dwight asked him about the preference between a brunette and a redhead in front of Pam and Jim. Way to up the sexual tension!

-Her “you’ve gotta have 8 hours of sleep” painfully akward attempt at small-talk with Jim. It was a painfully awkward moment where the usually composed Pam reverted to Michael-like behavior and in this show, lately as Michael is becoming more romantically competent this season as he’s having relationships with that real-estate agent and Jan, it’s good that the show is keeping the usual level of akwardness through other factors.

-She’s supposed to answer phones with her clothes on because they have to use up the whole three hours. The presence of the stripper is hilarious as she was just looming everywhere. Wait, why couldn’t anyone in the room use the stripper? Stanley’s married. Kevin’s engaged but I don’t think that would stop him. Ryan has a girlfriend upstairs who gets jealous of everything. Same with Dwight. Roy and Jim wouldn’t want word getting around that they’re doing stuff with strippers when they want to look like a gentleman with Pam. Oscar’s gay. Hmmmm….what about the warehouse manager, Daryl?

-“That is not the real Ben Franklin, I am 99% sure.” Hillarious. Thank god Jim is back to resorting to playing pranks on Dwight.

-The fact that Michael felt the need to confess to Jan about a lap dance he had not foreseeing that he might actually get in trouble as the office manager for throwing a bachelor party in the warehouse.

OK, let’s talk about what makes The Office really good, what gives it that something extra: The Office is the best portrayal of modern romance I’ve ever seen on TV or the movies. Jim is incredibly cool and cool under pressure as well: look at how he handled that near-disastrous situation Dwight put him in by replying, Blonde. When Roy asked him what kinds of girls he likes in an episode a couple seasons back, he answered single moms. And cool guys like Jim are expected to act cool all the time, but when he’s around Pam, you can visually see his knees turning into butter, and while it was really at a high point last season, it’s gotten more complex with the competition for Pam resulting from Karen, and the fact that Roy is losing weight and starting transforming himself into the fiancé he never had the chance to be. Jim and Pam are a classic love story but there’s now a beautiful sense of ambiguity to their relationship. In each episode, as Jim and Pam are trapped in that ambiguity, and these obstacles get in their way, Jim and Pam and Karen revert more and more like clueless middle schoolers panicking at the prospect of losing their relationship.

Scrubs:

I’ve rediscovered Scrubs lately. I casually watched episodes in its first two years, but recently I’ve been looking for something new to watch in syndication, since I’ve seen pretty much every episode of Sienfeld and Friends in syndication, and Scrubs is on all the time on Comedy Central and the Superstation (which I think is TBS). I think because it’s between two great shows, that helps, obviously, and the musical episode which was really great, clinched Scrubs place as a regular on my list of programs to watch.

-They actually have some legitimate anti-war stances and pro-war stances. The arguments of people in this show for and against Iraq could actually be borrowed by politicians in a debate verbatim. Humor is usually about stupid people, but humor is also about something entirely out of the ordinary, and it’s out of the ordinary for characters to be much smarter than we expect them to be. Examples include that bit on Conan O’Brien where Max and Conan exhibit an almost encyclopedic knowledge on topics such as reality tv, Grease the musical and the Winter Olympics in clearly scripted conversations that end in a stare-off or how on Newsradio, it’s revealed somewhere along the way that Andy’s Dick’s character is secretly a licensed dentist who had passions of becoming a really bad reporter. Another example is how in the film Wayne’s World, all of a sudden everyone in this room of rock stars and roadies knows everything in detail about the history of Milwaulkee, Wisconsin and can have an intelligent discussion about it.

-With that monologue that J.D. gives at the end, this show is like My Name is Earl in comedy-by-feeling-good

30 Rock:

I think 30 Rock is doing some things that the other backstage-SNL show on NBC, “Studio 60” is not doing: it does not put us to sleep with characters who are all exactly the same and it’s just more sharply written. At the same time, I kind of do like how “Studio 60” explores the fascinating topic of what goes on backstage, and I wish “30 Rock” would do the same to at least some degree. I feel like focusing on each of the characters a little so that’s where most of my posts will center.

-It’s been a while since I’ve taken European history, but I think this inbreeding thing is actually historically true. How many people know that.

-Who’s the bald guy, exactly? Don’t like him, although he looks moderately appropriate for his environment: The 30 Rock look.

-Judah Friedlander really has the 30 Rock look.

-The 30 Rock look (what I assume they were looking for when they cast this film) is self-deprecation. People who are brilliant humorously but don’t look very good. That’s Tina Fey’s whole comic shtick: make fun of her own lack of good looks. Honestly, though, she’s pretty good-looking and I feel like her whole comedic method is based around some unresolved therapy and self-image issues. She looks great, seriously.

-Alec Baldwin is hilarious as if that didn’t need to be said.

-Despite taking a part that was initially meant for someone else, Jane Krakowski, is really doing reat stuff with her role as Jenna. She’s delightfully quirky and has great comic timing, and she gets a lot of mileage out of her main comic quirk, thinking her sexuality can solve everything. And that also makes her more sexy, too.

-This episode is so solid narratively that it could work as a romantic comedy movie if you stretched it to two hours. Come to think of it, you can make two movies based on this: I could see someone pitching either the Jack-Liz subplot or the Jenna-inbred Prince as a film to a studio and having a decent possibility of getting greenlit.

-Carrying on that last thread, I think that the dynamic between Liz Lemmon and Jack Donaughy (I’m doing this on a non-wireless laptop so I don’t have some easy reference like imdb.com to look up the correct spelling of the last name so to those annoying people who like to correct spelling errors: deal with it) reminds me of a screwball comedy, which is actually quite impressive. Screwball comedies were a popular form of comedy during the Great Depression. The formula involved pairing people of two different social classes together in an unlikely relationship and the happy ending where the two get together romantically in the end supposedly gave hope to depression audiences that because love could conquer class differences in the film, perhaps their might be hope for their own poverty problems to be worked out through the compassion of the government or the people who had money or whatever else. Screwball comedies went out of style because of the socio-economic conditions that made audiences relate to them, so it’s kind of odd that in the year 2007, they kind of are starting to make that work with Jack and Liz. They are two people seperated by inconquerable class differences.

-Kenneth the Page really wouldn't be interacting with the president of NBC or the members of the show so much, in real life, would he?

Deal of No Deal (there was a commercial for this show):

This show is THE EXACT SAME THING OVER AND OVER. Some guy possibly winning a million dollars WITHOUT ANY SKILLS WHATSOEVER. THEY DON’T NEED ARITHMETIC. Why are we bragging about that? I love how they find new ways to promote it each week: this time a father of 8 is playing our repetitive game! This time a guy from Oklahoma is playing our repetitive game! Tonight Celine Dion is going to say a few words to our contestants before they do the same boring thing!