Last night I had the honor of recapping my first episode of America’s Got Talent this season, and was pleasantly surprised by how weird some of the acts were. Tonight, however, is a different story. The actual talent is mediocre at best, the bad acts aren’t amazingly awful, and the only decent moment is a male pole dancer who looks like a background extra from Queer as Folk.
Read My Recap from Tuesday Night’s AGT >>
America’s Got Talent is back in New York City, and Nick Cannon opens the show at the Statue of Liberty, perhaps trying to crossover to the alternate universe of Fringe so he can escape the pathetic mediocrity of tonight’s episode.
Triple Threat: The first act is a group of annoying Glee wannabes who can neither sing, dance nor act, so I’m officially lowering the threat level to whatever color is at the bottom of that stupid scale. They look like creepy ventriloquist dummies come to life, and it makes me embarrassed for the state of our nation’s theme park performers.
That abomination is followed by a guy who eats a pumpkin pie, a typewriter orchestra and a talentless parrot. Great, NBC just wasted 10 minutes of America’s time, much like President Obama did with his address.
Snap Boogie: He’s a dancer, and after watching several weeks of So You Think You Can Dance auditions, it’s nothing I haven’t seen before. He would’ve been sent to Las Vegas on that show, but I doubt he would’ve made the Top 20, so I expect he same thing to happen on this show.
Michael Turco: He’s a magician whose entire act seems to be making the entire roster of the Pussycat Dolls suddenly appear in boxes and cages. Like nearly every other magician on this show, he’s just kind of average.
Riley Schillaci: This female sword swallower is scary as hell not because of her talent, but because of her creepy monotone voice that makes me think she sacrifices puppies on an altar to Satan in her free time. The juvenile side of me wants to make a joke about her gag reflex, but I won’t. Instead, I’ll just say that once you’ve seen a guy swallow a coat hanger like we saw last night, this is nothing special.
Steven Retchless: He’s a pole dancer who dresses in nothing but silver short shorts, silver body paint and high heels. It seems like a recipe for disaster (or an epileptic gay man’s Ecstasy-fueled fantasy), but he really knows how to work the pole. Strangely, he’s the most talented person of the night. I’m less impressed when Nick Cannon jumps on the pole and does a halfway decent job for a guy in a three-piece suit.
ELEW: This strange dude plays the piano. He does it with a lot of intensity, but that’s really it. It’s entertaining, but at the end of the day, he’s just a guy playing the piano and the judges give him way more credit than he deserves.
Landau Eugene Murphy, Jr.: This guy is a simple car washer from West Virginia, but then he sings and sounds like member of the Rat Pack. It’s impressive, but I don’t buy it. He strikes me as one of those people who purposefully puts on an “oh gosh, I’m just a simple guy” acts to make the fact that he can actually sing seem more impressive than it is. It seems very inauthentic to me, like this is all staged by the America’s Got Talent producers. But he can sing.
(Image courtesy of NBC)
Senior Writer, BuddyTV
John watches nearly every show on TV, but he specializes in sci-fi/fantasy like The Vampire Diaries, Supernatural and True Blood. However, he can also be found writing about everything from Survivor and Glee to One Tree Hill and Smallville.
