My wife loves competition TV shows.
People baking cakes, people making art, people blowing glass, etc.
The ones that really get to me are the ones that touch on “hard skills.”
My wife will come to me, as a metallurgist with a background in welding and manufacturing, and say “I found a show about metal workers, we should watch it.”
Then it’s full of fucking artists.
I’m tired of all the fucking artists.
Especially because half of them now are just a physical manifestation of an amalgamation of every (to conservatives) negative stereotype of artists.
Here is some ugly, pink hair, tattooed and pierced freak, explains how she’s competing on behalf of every transgender, non-binary, lesbian who likes to make sculptures out of scrap metal and junk.
Sure, she’s got a MIG welder in her hand but she’s not a welder. Not in the way I think of a welder as a person who makes structural welds for a living.
I want a competition show for useful people who make shit for a living.
Day 1:
“Here’s a blueprint, there are some 2×4’s, you have a framing hammer, nail gun, tape measure, plumb line, square, and miter saw. You have 6 hours to frame these walls. Then we’re going to have three building inspectors evaluate your work for code compliance, stud spacing consistency, etc.”
Day 2:
“Here a blueprint, you have a MIG welder and a chop saw. You have 6 hours to make this. Then were going to have some CWI inspect it.”
Day 3:
Same thing, brick a wall.
Day 4:
Shingle a roof
Etc.
I want to watch skilled men build useful things with skill and precision.
Show me a guy who can frame a house perfectly or do a perfect TIG weld on a stainless steel manifold.
To me thats far more interesting than some pink hair enby making some piece of garbage.
And these would be working class guys, competing for money, and perhaps a bunch of new of tools, to start their own contractor company, weld shop, etc.
If I could, I’d get Mike Rowe to host it.
I’d watch the fuck out of that.
Forged in Fire. They do some silly stuff but it’s closest. And yes, I’d watch your show faithfully.
Have seen several of those types of shows. Most never make it halfway through a season before getting cancelled.
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There was a “worlds best handyman” series (not the right name), where actual skills were tested. Followed the standard process, a relatively simple test to get “immunity” for the big build later, etc.. There was also a flurry of bike building shows, some with actual competition, but generally it was drama.
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In fact, I have an acquaintance who got on one of those chef competition shows, and the amount of “scripted” drama that is put into them is awful. “Oh…. I burned the cake, and have to try and hide it!” is set up. “Whoops, I dropped a bowl full of _____” curiously never seems to destroy the outcome.
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Sorry to say it, but drama sells, actual skills do not.
Bullshit sells, actual skills do not. Five minutes of fake news will demonstrate it perfectly.
FIFY ;-))
Junkyard Wars aka Scrapheap Challenge was good especially the UK version with the giy from Red Dwarf hosting and some repeat competitors. These required building and testing some large device and occasionally resulted in spectacular failure like the car launching trebuchet. The related Full Metal Challenge was the most sensible thing Henry Rollins said or did in the last 20 years
I eagerly awaited some of the automotive related “reality “ shows to come on and quickly stopped watching all of them.. lots of whining and crying screaming and yelling and the “apprentice “ who never did anything and left early.. ?? buncha shiite.. I watch very little tv..
I watched the “Flip this House” series on some over the air channel.
It was sort of interesting to see people renovate some dumps. Then I noticed they were often “Surprised!” by stupid shit like collapsing basements, bad plumbing, or leaking roofs. One they tore the entire house down to the foundation. I kept thinking, “You are investing tens of thousands of dollars? Don’t you use a checklist to evaluate the house?” It was all to add drama, “Oh Noes, will they recover from this disaster?”
Then to even make it worse, as the renovation series went on, they invented disputes and disagreements drama between the partners, often by involving the spouse, or another third party.
If they made good money from their “acting” in the show, good for them!
Tough as Nails on CBS. Host is the guy from The Amazing Race. While not exactly what you described it is in the same vicinity.
One of the episodes should be: here’s a steel bar, there’s a mill; go make an AR-15 lower.
The wife and I turned on “Blown Away”, which is a glass blowing/sculpture competition. All artists by definition, but sometimes they make some neat stuff (and even artist drama beats out the endlessly-unfunny dad-bashing “family sit-coms”).
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Then a pink-haired competitor walks in, identifies “it”-self as representing non-binary transgender individuals, because “it” — and I quote — doesn’t “see many in my field”.
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Non-binary transgender people and professional glass-blowing artists are both tiny niche groups, so your odds of finding a whole lot of people who are both is vanishingly small, and your reason for competing is that you don’t see many like you who do what you do?
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I’m just waiting to hear an introduction like, “I’m a quad-racial sept-ethnic non-binary transgender pan-sexual dwarf furry atheist Wiccan professor of 3rd-century Madagascaran basket pottery, specializing in its modern-day structural-aesthetic applications. I teach because I don’t see many like me in my field.”
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Gee, ya think?