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shooting blanks
Too much pratfalling, not enough celeb prats
By Jeff Bercovici
Perhaps you are familiar with The Smoking Gun, the ingenious site that digs up documentary proof of celebrity greed and hubris and posts it on the web for all to snicker at.
Perhaps you are also aware that the creators of The Smoking Gun have been developing a series of specials for Court TV – in which case, you have perhaps wondered whether the site’s unique brand of journalistic troublemaking is really suited to television.
That’s a good question. The answer seems to be no.
Started in 1997 by two former Village Voice reporters, William Bastone and Danny Green, The Smoking Gun web site specializes in impaling the famous and the semi-famous on their own paperwork – lawsuits, contracts, police records and the like. (Yesterday's featured document was the health citation handed out to Rocco's, the setting of NBC's "The Restaurant.")
Given the tendency of so many celebrities to act like jackasses, such documents are usually best left to speak for themselves.
Unfortunately, that’s just what “Smoking Gun TV,” which debuts next Wednesday at 8 p.m. ET, doesn’t do.
A little of what makes the site so great has made it into the show, chiefly in a segment about the outrageous demands spelled out in various musicians’ concert riders.
But most of the segments are hammed up and padded out with all sorts of jokey crime reenactments, interview segments, and trips to The Smoking Gun’s forensic laboratory.
Some of this is funny. Much of it is filler.
But even if a robotic stripper repeatedly whacking a man in the head with its synthetic bosoms is your idea of clever, it’s hard to see how most of this relates to the unapologetic gotcha! spirit of thesmokinggun.com.
The show often has the feel of a field segment on Comedy Central’s “The Daily Show,” which is no accident. “Smoking Gun TV” is hosted by “Daily Show” correspondent Mo Rocca.
Rocca is undeniably funny, and a bit that features him getting made over to look like Nick Nolte in his famously drugged-out mug shot is pretty hilarious.
But Rocca is also the zaniest of “The Daily Show’s” reporters, the one least likely to be mistaken for an actual journalist. What “Smoking Gun TV” really needs is a straight man along the lines of Stephen Colbert or Brian Unger.
It also needs a lot more celebrity dirt. Stories like the one about a teenage “meat felon” who was arrested for stealing a steak off her neighbor’s grill are moderately funny, but they’re not what The Smoking Gun is known for.
Magazines like Us Weekly and In Touch have proved there is a huge unsatisfied demand for juicy tidbits about Hollywood actors, rock stars and even reality TV flunkies.
The Smoking Gun excels at sniffing out that kind of thing. So what’s the problem?
August 13, 2003© 2003 Media Life
-Jeff Bercovici is a staff writer for Media Life.
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