Whether or not it was a coincidence (it probably wasn't), both NBC and Fox have brand new sing-that-song-correctly game shows for the summer season.
After about a week or so, I finally found an hour to put in to check out these two shows -- Fox's Don't Forget the Lyrics and NBC's The Singing Bee -- and see which is the more useful of the two useless karaoke game shows.
I'll get my thesis out of the way now: Considering NBC announced Bee for the fall, Fox put together Lyrics for the summer and NBC bumped Bee up, Lyrics seems to be the less-lame (though, obviously more derivative) of the two shows.
Fox basically put together a Millionaire ripoff that feeds on the same tension as that savior of game show TV and the current reigning champ, Deal or No Deal. Contestants, led and coached by the always-too-excited and popular-with-the-Millionaire-crowd Wayne Brady (of Whose Line fame). He even sings along when contestants check their answers. The contestants choose from a pool of categories, then from the two songs within, and work their way up a prize-money ladder to the million-dollar tune. They've got three "backups" (life lines), including in-studio assistants. The biggest problem is the contestants get to amend their original performance if they can't get it the first time. A contestant's appearance can drag on over a few shows and the action is pretty slow moving.
That said, it's a bazillion times more entertaining than the Joey Fatone-helmed Singing Bee on NBC. Not that that's saying much. Flanked by a band (which is more prominent, but less talented than the Lyrics crew) and a quartet of dancers, Fatone picks six players out of the audience and then makes them come up with fairly simple lyrics in the first round (which four contestants survive). They whittle them down to two, and then a winner, who competes for $50,000. The songs here are ridiculously simple (someone had to figure out what comes after "I wanna rock and roll all night") and the biggest problem is small embellishments (like soulfully plugging the word "well" before a lyric) can get you a buzzer. It's way over the top and doesn't even follow simple spelling bee rules, which might make it more useful.
Overall, you probably shouldn't be wasting your time with either show. But Lyrics has a bit more to it and presents an actual challenge, whereas Bee is like something you'd see on Telemundo at 4:30 a.m.
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One time whilst watching Telemundo at roughly 4:30 a.m. I observed a talk show interrupted by a man in a full-size, Disney World character-style Captain Crunch costume who suddenly ran out into the aisles among the studio audience.
The entire room then sang along to the Captain Crunch song, which I didn't even know existed, and I can only assume you didn't either.
This is a very, very true story. I think I was about 12 at the time, and the moment has been burned permanently into my memory. It was my first surreal experience involving a man in an oversized costume, but strangely enough, it wasn't my last.
Posting this was absolutely necessary.
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