Great Expectations Or How I was Disappointed by Hollywood

This is actually one that I've been working on for a while, but reading critical theory has sort of gotten in the way of other pursuits. Enjoy

I’m a total geek. I have a little addiction with old legends and myths. Some of the stories give me a sense of fulfillment. Maybe it is that history is just so cool, and maybe it is just that there is a bone—somewhere on my right leg I think—that really like objects of fantasy. The thought that the Ark of the Covenant really shoots out some red lightning that makes the Nazis dissolve, or that the city of Shangri La really is hidden in the mountains and all our science hasn’t gotten us any closer to it, frankly fills my heart with joy.

Obviously I was excited to see that the SyFy channel made a show called Legend Quest where the host goes on adventures discovering the actual objects of antiquity and fantasy that make that bone in my leg feel all happy.

For those of you not familiar with SyFy it is a channel on basic cable that basically produces more movies than Bollywood. They are a refuge for actors with struggling careers and writers with a terrible sense of plot development. Furthermore, I feel like most of their movies are basically some type of Fanfiction. Fanfiction is when people become so obsessed with a character, or a book, or a movie that they decide to continue because it just didn’t offer them enough of an escape.

I digress.

So Legend Quest basically follows an over-excited Australian (I honestly don’t know where he is from and this was my cheap attempt to geographically place someone based on their accent) as he goes around with his producer (who is way to good looking to be a producer…you know that she is just producing TV shows to fill in her time in between modeling gigs) and his little Sherpa/cameraman. They travel all over the world in search of artifacts. Most of them he never actually finds. What little exploration there is has been parceled out between long segments of him yelling (obligatory veins bulging from his temples) and making wild accusations based on cursory observations that generally seem to lead him to Area 51. If he does seem to get close to it then he stops because of all the red tape he’d have to go through in order to continue. Oh, and meanwhile his producer/model is screaming at him to be careful, filling the entire show with some sexual tension you think can only be resolved by them making out on a pile of gold doubloons with skeletons from every major military campaign lay strewn about.

SyFy, you disgust me. I was so excited for this show, and it turned out to be just real crap. I’m fine with you producing crappy made-for-TV-movies, but if’ you’re going to make a show like this you should probably get the necessary permits so you can go digging up Indian burial grounds.