|
Mummies Don't Tell A review of Fox's "Opening the Tombs of the Golden Mummies: Live!" by Rick McKinney for Yack.com Show, don't tell. It's an old rule of thumb for good story-telling. And whether one considers Fox's Tuesday night "Opening the Tombs of the Golden Mummies: Live!" story-telling or hard news or both, it's a rule that should have been a snap to follow, considering television is all about seeing. But it wasn't followed well.
Oh, sure, it was entertaining. There were old mummy movie clips and Samuel L. Jackson grinning like the Cheshire Cat and that rather humorous moment when Egypt's top archeologist and "Keeper of the Pyramids" Dr. Zahi Hawass thought the curse was on him and panicked while crawling through a narrow passage. But as for slow pans of painted walls, close shots of artifacts and gripping, in-your-face footage of mummies, I had expected more. If not for Fox's accompanying web site, it might just have been another Geraldo and Capone episode. The web site is, to borrow a word from current youth vernacular, dank. It's great. Among other things, the site designers invited visitors to ask celebrity host Bill Pullman a question that he would then answer LIVE IN FRONT OF THE WORLD! (You gotta love the hype.) My question was, to be perfectly pedestrian, "What does it smell like down there?" Bill didn't answer. I bet it was dank. The site is tight. It has history, interviews, dozens of related stories, digital stills far crisper than anything we saw on TV, topographical maps that zoom in from outer space, everything the television coverage lacked, which is a lot. And no doubt Fox will want to keep the site active for a good long time. It will help justify the $3 million spent flying celebrities to Bahariya, Egypt to crawl through dark holes inhaling the cells of dead people older than Jesus. Point: the site will be there. Go check it out. Thanks to the time zone "delay," the show wasn't in fact "LIVE" to the west coast. "We must wait for L.A. to get home from work or the ratings will die!" The web, however, waits for no man, and as such the five minute video feed and Pullman's post-show chat both happened on-line before the show even started in California. Time is stranger than mummies. Speaking of strange, how about Dr. Hawass taking an artifact out of Bill Pullman's hand and saying "This material cannot be touched!" and then picking up several items himself? And how about the light bulb, duct-tape & stick combo Pullman held aloft while crawling on his knees as Hawass barked out orders and ignored nearly every question the poor guy asked? There's no question Fox employed the most hi-tech equipment to zap the show across the globe to us, so why no hi-tech lighting crew? Next time a network works with the "Keeper of the Pyramids" they would do well to hire a coach to teach him how to talk on TV, to talk a little more like host Hugh Downs. Downs, and Fox's accompanying web site, gave us everything Hawass didn't: comprehensible language, answers to questions, and focus on the material at hand. Unfortunately, neither Hugh Downs nor Fox.com were the ones guiding us through the tombs where all the action was. Instead, we got Dr. Zahi Hawass grunting, Dr. Zahi Hawass shouting, Dr. Zahi Hawass telling and telling, showing little and shaking everything he held up to the camera. Somewhere, in the shadows behind him, sat a whole catacomb of mystery and treasures and beauty that you and I will likely never see in person. -end-
 |
