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Music Review
Sharps & Flats
On Rhino's exhaustive "1970: The Complete Fun House Sessions," the Stooges obliterate the line between dumb joke and visionary achievement.
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Movie Review
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[03/10/00]

Music Review
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The sad, dangerous sounds of the Dirty Three capture the wisdom of pain and experience.
By Lydia Vanderloo
[03/10/00]

Movie Review
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In space, no one can hear you jeer.
By Andrew O'Hehir
[03/10/00]

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Most of us know that in transportation, health care, social services and gracious living, the United States lags behind the entire civilized world and France. But those are mere trifles. Television! Movies! Consumer brands! It's entertainment that makes the States great. Let the entire world chuckle at the American Comedy, so long as it keeps chuckling at our American comedies. We export not only jobs but dreams. Whom we cannot bomb, we entertain -- and famously. So it's shocking that in the very midst of the biggest domestic game-show boom since the 1950s, America has fallen unaccountably behind the rest of the world. Once proud colossi -- jackpot winners -- our game shows have become third-place contestants on the world stage.

Like the venerable Harley-Davidson vee-twin, underneath all the modern paint jobs and trim packages, the basic design of our shows hasn't changed since Dwight D. Eisenhower. "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire" is a monster hit, heralded as the program that saved network television. But at essence, it's only a '50s-style quiz bowl enlivened by a single contemporary twist: more money. "Greed" adds late-20th century avarice and betrayal to the same basic formula; and previous seasons' programs, such as Lifetime's "Debt" and Comedy Central's "Win Ben Stein's Money," employ the modern, cynical innovations of having contestants battle to go home empty-handed, or to walk away with a piece of someone else's pile. Significantly, though, except for "Greed," all of the above shows were created by a single evil foreigner, Michael Davies, who hiked "Millionaire" directly from his native Britain.

There are, it's true, more original concepts than these on domestic TV. The Food Network's "Ready Set Cook" features chefs -- celebrity and otherwise -- competing against the clock and one another; CBS's upcoming "Survivor" will feature 16 souls marooned on a deserted island, "Lord of the Flies" style, of whom only one will remain to claim the prize. But both of these shows were ripped off from overseas as well. "Ready Set Cook" is a direct adaptation of the British "Ready Steady Cook," whose own lineage traces to the Japanese hit (and domestic cult favorite) "Ryori no Tetsujin," or "Iron Chef." "Survivor" was lifted wholesale from the scandalous Swedish (and later Pan-Scandinavian) show "Expedition Robinson."

It's not uncommon for game-show ideas to migrate around the world. Since the shows are dirt-cheap to produce, and since their appeal transcends boundaries of language and culture, production companies from all the major TV markets have long trolled foreign airwaves for new development ideas. In the past, though, the trade balance generally favored the States. "Wheel of Fortune," for example, spawned a multitude of overseas editions, each with its own local interpretation of Pat Sajak and Vanna White. The canonical quiz-show format seen in "Millionaire" and dozens of other shows, with their coifed hosts and garish sets, seems to have appeared in every country that ever boasted a TV network, including the prize-tastic Soviet Union. Now, however, we seem to have reached a point at which anything even remotely original has to come from abroad.

That's bad enough on its own, but even if we're importing the most groundbreaking ideas -- which we're not -- we have a hard time reproducing foreign shows without watering them down into a thin gruel, until everything bizarre, risky and ultimately valuable about them is lost.

"Ready Set Cook" is basically a harmless, quirky program on which people trot around improvising sensible dishes that you, the audience, could make at home. Conversely, "Iron Chef" is a mad circus of culinary terror, where professional chefs use all the powers at their disposal to beat a set of resident champions at Chinese, Japanese and French haute cuisine.

Next to "Ready Set Cook's" go-kart derby, "Iron Chef" is Formula One racing: There's a certain architectonic quality about it that fascinates you because you can't even imagine doing it at home. As with Formula One, you can't always tell what you're watching, but you can be confident that the competition is taking place at levels far beyond those that you can perceive. "He's throwing out the apricot sauce!" the "Iron Chef" commentator exclaims, as the crowd bursts into a stunned roar. "The foie gras! He's heading for the foie gras!" Whatever he's doing with that crème brulée, you know you'd better stay the hell out of his way.

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