"Grease" -- You're Not The One That I Want

Anyone who mocks "American Idol" as dreck should be forced to sit through "Grease: You're The One That I Want." it is of course in many ways an imitation of "Idol," but "Grease" proves how very difficult it is to do this sort of thing. It's a miserable failure as a TV show in every way -- poorly edited, poorly paced, poorly cast. They might find perfectly good leads for the revival of "Grease" (it's not a terribly demanding show vocally) and I certainly hope they do. But as television, this is just awful. Everything is confusing: how they separate out the people moving forward from the bottom two, the order in which they perform, the editing of the back stories and on and on. I won't bash Billy Bush but the hosts certainly don't come across well. And the judges invariably hold their punches -- singers who just performed TERRIBLY are told they've got what it takes to star on Broadway (presumably because the judges don't want to badmouth their potential leads). I even feel sorry for the poor audience, which contains about 15 people and is forced to wave their hands in the air or scream in delirium every two minutes. And the nicknames! "Religious Sand," "Slacker Danny" and so on. Just cringe-inducing.