![]() ![]() You can perhaps gain sympathy for what one element of the experience feels like, but it seems awfully arrogant to set this up as any sort of "now I understand what these guys go through" mind-blower. And nobody is saying that you can't gain an extra appreciation for some of what actual soldiers go through by doing those things.īut to say that you can understand what it's like to be in the military by shooting a gun and swimming with heavy gear is like saying you can understand what it's like to have cancer by shaving your head. No one is saying swimming with heavy gear isn't hard, or learning to shoot a machine gun isn't hard, or doing a belly-crawl isn't hard, or walking in the mud isn't hard. No, Dean Cain, there is no realistic chance you could die, surrounded by what producers recently told TV critics was "a huge redundancy of safety" meaning that "at no time was anybody put in specific harm's way." That "huge redundancy of safety" was mentioned when actor Terry Crews claimed to have almost drowned, and it was immediately clear that producers wanted everyone (maybe including their insurance company) to know that this was, you know, kind of a figure of speech - any injuries, the producer clarified, were what he called "weekend warrior type of injuries that you'd get if you were a softball or a flag football player." Softball or flag football, got it? Honestly, I half-expected him to use the word "Nerf."Ĭlaiming to have been in danger here is a little strange, particularly when compared with the risks faced by people who do this kind of thing in the military rather than on a game show. Your inner voice may reasonably rebel at this. Not that this keeps Dean Cain from describing his feelings, during one portion of a mission in which they're swimming with heavy gear on, with the phrase, "I know there's a chance I could die." separation from your family and your daily life and fear of coming to bodily harm. You know, it's reminiscent of those, other than. Host Samantha Harris (who used to be the co-host of Dancing With The Stars, in fact) says at one point that the missions are "reminiscent of counterinsurgencies that have taken place all over the world." The show's conceit is to stress over and over that it is designed to teach people like Dean Cain and Olympic skier Picabo Street what it's really like to be a soldier. That's right: If you successfully complete a series of military-style drills designed to emulate military service, NBC will give your charity one-fifth as much money as CBS gives to the champion of Big Brother, the show where you win money literally for doing nothing the longest. And at the end of the series, someone wins $100,000 for their charity. The idea behind the show is to pair eight celebrities with eight military/law enforcement partners in a kind of Combat With The Stars format and put them through a series of competitions, structured as "missions." Each time a celebrity completes a "mission," he (or she) earns a bit of money for a veterans' or first-responders' charity. The fact that NBC's new reality show Stars Earn Stripes is kind of an offensive concept should not distract you from the fact that it's stultifyingly boring as television and badly designed as a reality-competition show. Terry Crews is one of eight celebrities supposedly getting a taste of military life in Stars Earn Stripes. ![]()
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