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[PATV] Monday, May 26, 2014 - Penny Arcade: The Series Season 4, Ep. 15: Strip Search (Part 1)
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[PATV] Monday, May 26, 2014 - Penny Arcade: The Series Season 4, Ep. 15: Strip Search (Part 1)
- In this episode we revisit Strip Search and get a glimpse of where the artists are now.
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Can't wait for Part 2!
Twitch: KoopahTroopah - Steam: Koopah
I hope this leads to some news about a Season 1 DVD, and more importantly a possible Season 2.
With 23 days to go, Erika has $35K on an $18K ask; her Patreon is generating $690 per comic.
And I don't mean "I'm 100% sure that's what it is". I mean, "I personally have to see it that way because I've been waiting so long, and I need that shit". I know all the actual editing was finished several months ago, but I suppose it had to all be watched and that takes a lot of time...I was starting to get a little worried that the flame had died out and the DVD sales might suffer as a result.
I learned via the social medias and the assortment of webcomics I harvested from strip search that the whole group raised boatfulls of money via kickstarter/patreon/whatever the new thing is and all, over time, migrated to Seattle. It's pretty incredible that a TV show can change that much for 12 people- and all 12, too! Nobody came up short or got left behind, from what I understand.
I credit it to the experience being online that enables instant feedback and ongoing support that a "real" reality TV show doesn't.
But as I think we all found out, there wasn't anything realer. And it was great, and seriously will you just take my money for a DVD.
Speaking as somebody who actually stopped watching Strip Search after Lexxy was brought back, I personally never blamed Lexxy for what happened or had any antipathy towards her over it.
It just upset me because IMO it cheapened the whole premise of the show to see them rewrite the rules on the fly. It's their competition so obviously they're allowed to, but for me the high point of SS was seeing Mike agonize over who to eliminate when they cut Lexxy the first time because he didn't feel either contestant deserved to be eliminated but the rules of the competition mandated it; it was gut-wrenching to see how much he cared and made the stakes of the competition feel very real, and made me respect Mike and Jerry for how seriously they were taking the whole thing. But then arbitrarily changing the rules to save Lexxy the very next episode made all of that seem like it was meaningless.
Again, not to say Mike and Jerry aren't allowed to do what they want on their own show, and not to start this debate over again. It just killed my interest in the show personally. But I never thought it had anything to do with some sort of behind-the-scenes machinations or bias for Lexxy.
How would you have proceeded? Would you have kept Nick, kept Mac, tried to forge on a person short for the rest of the game, or contrived some non-elimination later on? And keep in mind, there was simply not enough time in the shooting schedule to make up any kind of restoration challenge between Alex, Ty and Lexxy, so that's not an option.
Also, I might argue that Lexxy's restoration STRENGTHENED the premise of the show, or at least strengthened the reasons people loved it. Go back and watch what happens the next episode, regarding the fallout in the house after Lexxy returned.
It's not about making a "comic worth of continuing in the competition," though. It's about who made the relatively better comic of the two people up for elimination in that episode, and Mike and Jerry's job was to decide which that was. Granted, not easy. Just as it wasn't easy for them to decide whose comic was better and whose was worse the week before when Lexxy orginally got cut - if it was about "making a comic worthy of continuing" then nobody would have gotten eliminated that week at all because Mike and Jerry clearly felt both Lexxy and Tavis had produced a worthy comic, which is why Mike felt awful about the whole thing. But somebody had to go, the somebody who produced the relatively worse comic of the two, because that was the premise of the entire head-to-head elimination setup - and that somebody was deemed to be Lexxy at the time.
If they were judging only on the basis of "Is this comic good enough to merit continuing in the competition," they could have decided not to eliminate either Lexxy or Tavis. This screws up the numbers also, but they could have made up for it by doing an episode later on where three competitors are up for elimination and only one survives...obviously, they are willing to do things that screw up the numbers and then come up with fixes after the fact.
Then the next week, as it to happened, Nick and Mac both made comics that were seen as relatively worse than those Lexxy and Tavis had done. Which sucks for Lexxy and Tavis, but them's the breaks. Lexxy and Tavis ended up candidates for elimination when they did because of their own poor performance. And obviously sucked for Mike and Jerry too, because it brought home that they had cut somebody who produced work which could easily have saved them if it had come up against weaker competition (like Nick and Mac). Watching Mike and Jerry have to make those tough decisions was for me every bit as interesting as watching the contestants actually compete.
But instead of making a decision between Nick and Mac, they punted and cut both. And then yes, the numbers are fucked up, but that's a problem of their own making, and their solution is to bring back Lexxy, which makes their decision the previous week - again, for me the most gripping part of the entire series - irrelevant. Whether it was the actual thought process or motivation or not (the editing that has to take place to make the finished episode of the series inevitably makes it harder to tell), the impression created was that they felt bad about having to make the tough decision to cut Lexxy previously, and their frustration at Nick and Mac's sub-par work allowed them a convenient way to "take it back." But having to make tough calls and live with how the results affected the competitors is part of judging any competition. Sadly, I don't think Mike and Jerry were prepared for how difficult that would be for them to handle going in to Strip Search, and I sympathize.
But from that point on there was no good reason to believe that what I as a viewer understood to be the fundamental rules and setup of the competition wouldn't continue to be changed to suit whatever Mike and Jerry believed to be the right thing to do at the time, and that gut-wrenching events which made me empathize deeply with Mike, Jerry, and the competitors in one episode wouldn't simply be invalidated with a wave of the hand in the next installment. It made it seemed like they were just making it all up they went along. And in a sense, they absolutely were! Nobody involved with Strip Search had done anything like a talent-based competitive reality series before. So I don't hold it against them at all! I wasn't mad about it. I just decided if that was the way things were going to be it wasn't something I cared to invest my time in any more. Maybe for other people the whole thing increased the appeal of the show, I wouldn't know. It's a subjective thing, if it did, good for those people. It killed my interest pretty much completely.
So that was my perspective. Really not interested in having an extended argument about it again, as all of these argument on both sides were rehearsed after the actual episode in question went up. In any case, to reiterate: the idea that Lexxy somehow plotted or pulled strings to get back on the show, if anybody harbored any such notions, is just silly.
Beer is the perfect lubricant for twisted and vile animal gibberish. I use it myself when the times are ripe and my need great.