Me Tarzan, You… hey anyone out there??
It started out bad and has become worse - at least rating wise. Past Friday the second episode of the casting show “Me Tarzan, You Jane” was broadcasted on Sat.1 in Germany. And the search for the future Tarzan and Jane in the German premiere of Disney’s musical version of its animated hit movie “Tarzan” managed to loose parts of its way too small audience. From a total of 1.54 million viewers (5.0% of the market) the show went down to 1.35 million viewers, equaling only 4.4% market-share - as Quotenmeter reported. Whatever one personally thinks the show has to be considered a bomb by now. The German media business website DWDL even calls it a “megaflop”.
This is especially true if one considers that the second episode was the last episode covering the actually auditioning phase. Starting this Friday the “recall”-phase will beginn, in which the jury reduces the number of contestants during singing and dancing classes before viewers will be entering the game later-on in live shows. If the successful German version of “Pop Idol” is anything to go by, ratings have a tendency to go down (at list a bit) once the auditioning phase and the more serious recall-phase starts. If this trend should show up for “Me Tarzan, You Jane” it might spell doom for the show, as there isn’t much of a viewer-base to loose audience from in the first place. Just for comparison: the 5th season the German version of “Pop Idol” past Saturday had its first live show (after the auditioning and the recall recaps) and even with a slight downturn in the numbers it sill managed to attract more than three times as many viewers as “Me Tarzan, You Jane”: 5.15 million viewers (17.3% market share) according to Quotenmeter.
BUT there is a slight chance that the downturn might NOT show up. Why? Because of an important difference in concept between “Pop Idol” Germany and “MTYJ”. While the chapters / segements of MTYJ closely resemble those of Pop Idol (auditioning, recall/training, live shows with viewer voting), MTYJ in neither of its only two auditioning episodes emphasized a comedy element as much as Pop Idol does - which might be also one of the reasons the show is less popular. Mind you, they tried at times - but (IMHO) without success. This might be due to the fact that the jury of MTYJ is very competent (a musical manager, an acclaimed musical actress and a casting director) but lacks a character as Dieter Bohlen or Simon Cowell who is able to entertain the audience with its comments. A “sorry, I don’t see you as Jane” if a clearly overweight participant has performed one of the worst singing of the whole show is just not cutting it. Which is also one of my complaints with the second auditioning episode. The jury was just too friendly. Man, I want to be entertained!! And halfhearted, not really witty comments from the speaker in the off do NOT do it here. The serious approach could have worked, if they would have come up with something to engage viewers, get them interested in the participants but unfortunately they failed here (even so they tried with interviews shwocasing some “my life is sooo difficult” statements).
Nevertheless, the second auditioning episode was better than the first (not hard to pull off). But they would have needed at least another three or four to reach a level acceptable for a prime-time show. Especially the jury needs to get more entertaining and lively. Also once again the editing was strange. Especially when they edited four really bad audition performances together and had one singer’s voice blaring over the performances of other singers at times (and do not get me started about the amateurish graphics used to cross the performers out at the end of the montage). What was that?? It neither presented the auditions correctly nor was it funny…
Other stranger decisions concern the directing. Why were we shown a participant warming up for a dance audition in an according dress, when we a) never got shown any dance auditions and b) he was later on shown in a different dress performing in the singing audition (in which he passed to the next round by the way).
When I learned that they would squeeze several auditions (those in Stuttgart and Hamburg) into this (including ad-breaks) roughly 60 minute episode I had hoped for a fast paced, entertaining episode. But even having had time to think about the result I still can’t rule it either fast paced or really entertaining enough to glue me to my seat. Sure it got better from the week before and yes, we got to see some dismal auditions (which called for being made fun of) and we got to see some really good auditions, introducing us to performers we sure will get to learn more about in the next weeks. But this brings me to my next critic (already mentioned above shortly): while Pop Idol manages to get the audience connect to at least some of the auditioners by short clips, MTYJ failed in this regard. They just went for short interviews done during the waiting for the audition. That just doesn’t work as far as creating a bond between viewer and performer is concerned (but should be rather cheap to produce).
Overall my rating: an OK show for the late afternoon program but not up to prime-time standards. If you nevertheless want to give it a chance: the whole second episode can now be watched online for free. Coming Friday the third episode is scheduled. As mentioned it moves on to the recall process and just based on the short preview at the end of thes econd episode will are going to see some tough dance classes and training. So let’s hope that the beginning of this second phase is used by the creative team to restart the show.