Drafted Could Have Been Really Interesting...

...But Instead The Score Tried to Make a Quick Buck and it's Terrible

I should start by stating that I had intended to apply to be on the show. The premise sounded fascinating: The Score television network would scour the country looking for Canada's next sportscaster. One of the main reasons that I watch TSN instead of Rogers Sportsnet or The Score is the appeal of their on-air talent. I find Jay Onrait and Dan O'Toole pretty hilarious. I think that Darren Dutchyshen is practically a Canadian institution. Ask any of your friends that follows sports in this country and they'll have an opinion about the TV personalities on the three major networks. Hosting Sportscentre would be a dream come true for a lot of fans. Thousands of people would wait anxiously to showcase their talents. Think of it as American Idol, or So You Think You Can Dance, except for sports geeks doing their best play by play, and...wait, why did I think this would be a great idea again?

But, as it turns out, the problem wasn't with the premise of the program, but rather the execution. I should have known that there would be issues when The Score promoted the idea as "Gillette Drafted" instead of just plain "Drafted". In an era in which broadcasting anything, anything at all, to a national audience involves mass commercialization, the Gillette part of the name simply slipped my attention. I'm far too numb to this sort of thing to pick up on the subtleties of corporate sponsorships. What I didn't imagine was the lengths that The Score, and Gillette by proxy, would go to in order to promote the sponsor's product.

Every segment of the show was as much about promoting Gillette as it was about choosing the winner of the competition. I first became worried when during the initial interview phase, the candidates were asked about personal grooming and Gillette, etc. It got progressively worse, until the breaking point came when the candidates were set to interview Bas Rutten. Bas is a bad-ass dude, and the idea of just dropping the finalists in there to do an intervew with him without any preparation at all sounded very interesting. Unfortunately, before the interview itself, we were subjected to watching the finalists "prepare" for the interview by using Gillete products. Watch the first couple of minutes of Episode 40: Andy's Bad Hair Day. We have to watch him shave? Really? By the time the interview itself rolled around, I was so turned off by the shaving scene that I had lost all interest in the competition. The Score had effectively killed their own punchline with a terrible lead-up.

It got worse. Scroll up to the Journey and Transformation Episodes and watch how the makeup artist shamelessly shills the Gillette products at the end of the episode. I'm not naive about this sort of things. As I said at the start, broadcasting to a large audience requires sponsorship. But this was a whole new level. How does The Score expect to have ANY credibility with their viewers after this disaster? The home of the hardcore? You can honestly say that to me with a straight face?

If my criticism seems overly harsh, know that I would never write something this biting if the product was just crappy. It's not that it's bad, because then I would have just ignored it like so many other terrible programs. It's that The Score wasted a really great opportunity by chasing a few extra dollars. The poor soul that had the great idea in the first place must cry a little every time his dream is sold for a few more dollars every episode. How hard would it have been to call it Gillette Drafted and just thank the sponsors once or twice a show? Or run only Gillette ads during commercial breaks?

The great irony of all my rage is that I just bought a bottle of Gillette shampoo yesterday. In the deep recesses of Gillette's marketing department, someone is laughing maniacally.


NB