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About sixteen years ago I was visiting LA with my family and at every major landmark we'd see a bunch of studio folks (probably interns) walking around handing out free tickets to watch a TV show being filmed. We decided it would be interesting to see how it all worked, so we ended up being in the audience for a taping of The Martin Short Show. It was an extremely short lived show, and for good reason. We were told to arrive at the studio about an hour or so in advance. After waiting outside in line for a short time, they let us in and immediately began sorting us into seats based on appearance. They didn't want any obvious blocks of people (so if there was a big tour group wearing the same colored t-shirt they would scatter them), and they simply would not stand for shorts or skirts in the front row (red blooded Americans can't stand to see bare legs, by god), so most of the larger groups were broken up into twos and threes. There was hardly anyone wearing pants because it was southern California in the summer, but they still somehow filled the front row. My family was all in shorts so we ended up together somewhere in the middle of the crowd. They had several APPLAUSE and LAUGH signs and made ample use of them throughout the show. There were also three or four crowd control folks whose entire jobs involved frantic arm movements like "waving my arms up and down with my palms up, c'mon cheer! NO LOUDER!" or the "I'm cutting off my own head, that means shut up!" maneuver. There was a comedian featured on the show the day we were there, so he came out before filming started and cracked a few jokes to warm up the crowd. However generally we were expected to laugh or cheer on command and then shut up. Overall the crowd's reactions were not spontaneous in any way. When Martin Short finally came out it was an absolutely massive non-event. Hardly anyone in the crowd noticed, and he did a quick "oh hi," wave to the audience before sitting down and ignoring everyone besides the cue card guy for the rest of the show. It's no wonder the show was cancelled after one season as it was amazingly dull. They were going for a late night model talk show with celebrity guests, a band and guest performers, but everyone we saw was C level at best. The banter was dry and uninteresting, and the crowd reaction was extremely forced. The comedian was the only good bit. He did a set during the show which was pretty funny, and then after the whole thing wrapped up we were asked to stay a little longer so he could do a second set because they wanted to be able to splice in more jokes if they needed. Once he finished his second set, one of the producers told us we were done, that Martin would not be signing autographs, and that we could visit the studio gift shop if we wanted on our way out. That was that. All told it was a semi-interesting but mostly boring affair that I probably wouldn't repeat anytime in the future.
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May 24, 2016 20:24
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| # ¿ May 11, 2024 21:56 |
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