Kaonashi Ga Suki

Have you ever been to a TV screening? Some marketing research companies unaffiliated with TV studios go around the country and invite people to watch and evaluate new TV shows. Last Friday my boyfriend and I attended such a screening. Ok, granted I read the invitation wrong and thought that it said it was for a TV taping, so we were kind of disappointed at first when we realized that it was just a screening. However, when you consider that an actual taping takes several hours, I was kind of relieved.

My feelings of relief slowly started to turn to uneasiness as we arrived at the screening, which took place in a hotel conference room. I was hoping we’d at least watch the shows on a relatively large TV in a more, theater-like surrounding. Not so. We walked in this conference room and found four small, 27 inch TVs in the middle of the room, each facing one wall of the room. “Classy,” I sarcastically thought.

I then took in the rest of my surroundings. My boyfriend and I realized that we didn’t belong there at all. You see, I technically didn’t receive the invitation. Rather, it was addressed to our apartment’s prior occupant, an old woman. Judging from the rest of the test audience, the shows we’re about to watch are aimed more at middle-aged, middle America. The type who watch sappy afternoon soap operas and do most of their shopping at Walmart. My boyfriend would later note that in the survey we were filling out, the possible answers for Level of Education only went up to “College” while the possible answers for Number of Children went up to “7″! What the hell?

Then the screening actually began. We were told that we would be shown a one-hour drama and two half-hour sitcoms. To enhance the feeling of watching at home, commercials were added, much to everyone’s chagrin.

The drama was called “Soulmates” or something like that, and the plot was basically about past lives. A psychologist realizes that she may have known her latest patient in a past life. Of course she and her patient become romantically involved even though she doesn’t know much about him, and of course he is a mystery wrapped in an enigma and all that.

My boyfriend and I absolutely hated the show within the first five minutes.

The plot was ridiculous and hackeneyed, the acting was horrible, and there’s no chemistry between the main actors. The editing was horribly choppy. It’s as if I was watching bits and pieces from the whole season rather than just the pilot. One second the doctor and her patient are barely getting to know each other’s names, then in the very next scene they’re sharing Chinese food and cuddling by the fountain. What the hell?

What else? Well, the ending felt like it was tacked on. The whole episode focused on the idea of past lives, then suddenly they introduce the notion of computer terrorists. What. The. Hell? Oh, and the weirdest thing was that, although this was supposed to be a pilot episode -which suggests that it was filmed sometime in the past year- “Soulmates” looks like it was filmed 10 years ago! The film quality itself looked a little hazy, like it was old film. The characters’ clothing looked outdated. The kicker for me were the phones. The cordless phone and the cell phone were both these giant brick phones that I last saw in 1995! I didn’t recall any mention of the show taking place in the mid 90’s. I was actually glad for the commercials since many were obviously more modern and filmed within the last decade.

We desperately wanted to leave much earlier but couldn’t. Supposedly, hotel staff requested that no one leave their seats after the lights are turned off for safety reasons. I guess they didn’t want people tripping on cords and stuff. Me personally though, I think that the host just made that up so people couldn’t escape during the screening.

Thankfully the show had ended and we had our chance to evaluate it. You can bet that my boyfriend and I gave our full opinions on “Soulmates”. We noticed that not surprisingly, a few of the people sitting around us gave more favorable ratings towards the show. Yep, we were definitely NOT the target audience for the tripe we just watched.

Since the lights were on at this point, we took this opportunity and bolted out of there.

This experience should teach me not to open other people’s mail

TV screening, acting, characters, plot, editing, story, audience