New Show Review: Treasure Hunters

I finally watched the first episode of Treasure Hunters. Full disclosure: I had forgotten to DVR it, so I missed the first hour of the two-hour episode, but I quickly caught on.

The idea behind the show is good. Basically, it is The Amazing Race, but with three-person teams instead of two-person teams, and the clues are a bit harder--more like season one of TAR, where the teams actually had to think through some riddles. And at the "pit stop" the teams find "an artifact." There are seven artifacts throughout the race, and teams will need all seven to find the "treasure" at the end. The last team to arrive at the pit stop--eliminated.

Seems like a winning formula. Especially the fact that each team is a triad. As one sociologist once said (Hegel?), there is no such thing as a triad--each triad is really just three diads. Which basically means: when you have a group of three, someone is going to be the odd man out, and the reactions of any one person in the group to another is going to be influenced by their relationship with the third person. Three people groups have wonderful possibilities for a television show. But this show has two major problems:

1.) Editing. The editing is awful. As with TAR, teams end up doing things at different paces. And Treasure Hunters actually shows you how far behind teams are from leading teams (at least they did so at certain points). A welcome change from the Race. But that's about the only positive the editing crew has going for it. When teams are split up, they rerun the same exact footage of the host telling us what will happen next. So, for example, the first team gets to a point in the race and the host says "teams will now look for the clue on this hill, and will then have to decipher it to determine which way to proceed." Five minutes later, the next team gets there, and the identical clip of the host is shown. Totally unnecessary, ridiculously repetitive and just plain annoying.

2.) Laird Macintosh. He's the host, and he's horrid. His line delivery is robotic, and he totally lacks charm. Maybe he is trying to go with the show's "mysterious" vibe but it totally doesn't work. Hate him.

The best part of the show? A team called The Wild Hanlons. They are a father, his brother and his son. These guys sport mullets and are quite possibly the dumbest people on television. They are in a show that is all about clues and riddles, but Papa Hanlon has no time for that. Instead, he says things like "I think we're going to Colorado next, because we're close to there," even though the clue doesn't point that way at all, and, when trying to find the combination for a lock, instead of using the hints he has gotten so far, he just starts calling out random numbers.

Will I continue to watch? Probably--there just isn't much else out there right now to occupy my television viewing time. Will it be worth my time? Probably not.