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RANDOM 1
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Date Reviewed: 10/20/05 |
Written by: Felix Vasquez Jr. |
Run Time: 1:00 |
A&E |
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Review: As the famous saying goes "No good deed goes unpunished" and while the people on-screen are doing good deeds, we're the ones being punished. With "Random 1", it's an often tumultuous test in both patience and tolerance as this attempted family fun reality show shows us in true spirit what they're attempting to do. It's never truly verified if these two men were engaging in this sort of good deeds journey before the cameras were turned on, but we never get a sense of good intentions throughout the show, just pure utter opportunists posing as good Samaritans. The pilot I saw was purely an early cut but it was obvious where the intentions lay. The show is apparently low-budget with a gritty filming and people whom they supposedly approach out of random. In my media class I was told that in order to film someone on screen you have to get a signed affidavit with permission to film them, so the prospect that people are just plucked from the streets is jumping the gun in many respects. In the first episode, they exploi--I mean use the tragedy of hurricane Katrina as a platform to help boost the puritanical nature of the show in the eyes of the audience but the gauge never really worked for me because reality shows are hardly ever about good intentions, just opportunism in all its glory. The narration constantly declares "We have no money to give..." to which I expected him to ask the director: "but we are getting paid for this, right?" People are hardly plucked at random on the streets of a city, and many of the subjects are obviously staged. To prevent any such questions of realism from the audience, there are two people featured to help and two have differing needs. They seek someone with a good story, so they can pull on our heartstrings. One with a simple task and one with a large task so both can be deemed touching in opposite ways. One man needs his keyboard fixed so he can make extra money playing music, and a beautiful woman is stopped and explains that she used to be a stripper and wants to become a model to prove to herself and her stepfather that she's worth something. The two Samaritans drive around in a dinky old car which always conveniently breaks down when they're down to the wire leaving us in suspense and they're followed by an RV crew who helps fulfill their deeds. As you'd expect, for their RV crew, there is an assortment of characters who bicker and argue and shout trying to get the job down while--just to remind us how mis-matched but good intentioned these two characters are--they snap at each other at the drop of a dime and argue constantly, it's intended as engrossing chemistry when most of it is awfully forced. Andre rambles on procrastinating and James drones on narrating, while both always yell back and forth telling each other to shut up and stay quiet, and we're never given a reason WHY they want to help people, so naturally it's all just one big melodramatic theme that resonates from beginning to end. What's worse is, at such obvious times, they sit down gauging these people for something sad to reveal to the audience for us to moan in sadness with questions like: "Do you drink? Did something bad happen to you? Are you sick?" The show is mostly in
bad taste for people who want to believe everything that is
happening is true to life. It's nice to think that people are
helping one another, and baiting us with Katrina was just an
incredibly shrewd maneuver to keep us watching. The people are often
artificial, grating and hard to sit through, and there's nothing
ever really there for the
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