In This Economy?

The Facts!

Fox announced on Wednesday that they were developing a new reality show based around the magical world of company layoffs, called “Someone’s Gotta Go”. Yeah, that really is the title. I know, I was shocked at how dickish it is, too.

The premise of this delightful new show centers around a different small business each week. All of the businesses featured are real and all of them need to lay off an employee to stay afloat. Where things get interesting (or as they say in the biz — where the whole thing becomes “good tv”) is that it’s not the boss that is in charge of the layoff, it’s the employees themselves.

Let me explain in a little more detail.

Each week we meet some new sad sack company of around 15-20 poor souls. Then some host dude sweeps in (Fox wouldn’t say who, but my money’s on Richard Branson) and hands the company’s books over to the employees. At once all of the employees know each others salaries and an exciting/diabolical/disgusting/decidedly reality TVish thing starts happening.

Is Jane really worth the $75k she’s pulling down? What about Sven? He takes twenty smoke breaks a day. And that dude Benny is a Scientologist!

This shit is going to get really nasty. Imagine having to defend your salary to all of your coworkers. Now couple that stress with the stress of having a camera crew following you every time you go to take a piss. It’s a volatile combo.

The employee that is eventually deemed not worthy will be laid off (and later cannibalized in a spin off show called “Market Cannibalization”). That’s it. Oh, and the rest of the employees get to keep working. Yay!

My Opinion!

This shit is REALLY despicable. Though I can’t say that I’m surprised. Fox is, after all, a part of the same mega-company that employs Glenn Beck, momentarily published OJ Simpson’s If I Did It and televised an airplane-dragging race between an elephant and a small army of little people. Yeah. Seriously. Watch it HERE (spoiler alert: the elephant wins with an official time of 31.0 seconds).

This new show is just another phase in Fox’s bizarre metamorphosis from “shitty network” to “shitty network that has American Idol but is still a shitty network”.

But you know what? For every hater out there like me there’s a talking head TV exec waiting to present the other side. In this case it’s Mike Darnell, Fox’s chief of alternative programming. Alternative programming? Sweet title, dude. He had this to say about “Someone’s Gotta Go”:

“I feel that it’s part of the times that we are living in. It’s certainly no worse than watching the news every night and hearing all the statistics and watching what is happening. To be frank, like all these shows, if you don’t want to watch, don’t watch it.”

Don’t worry Mike, I won’t. Instead I’ll seek out some alternative programming.

Tags: Fox News, layoffs, reality tv, recession

This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 8th, 2009 at 11:45 PM and is filed under Bad News, WTF. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.