Cee-Lo's New Reality Show Is More Like CeeLOL
The bad news is that a Cee Lo show exists. The good news is that you only need to sit through the first episode of it to really, truly overdose on everything Cee Lo could possibly hope to glean from his disastrous foray into reality television.
Furry headdresses with deer antlers poking through their plumes, girls bouncing about in school uniforms, little league baseball, a swimming pool, a nondescript “Hollywood Recording Studio” and Cee Lo in a caftan: all of that was somehow shoved into half an hour complete with commercials, and it made up the glorious bulk of the first episode of Cee Lo Green’s “The Good Life.”
Despite the fact that Green’s got one of the most recognizable voices in modern music—just try to get “Crazy” or “F—k You” out of your head at the mere mention of either hit—he’s cannonballed into reality TV, one of the cringe-worthiest forms of consumable entertainment out there.
It’s one thing to start out with a television show following around you and your family, all to trade in the mundane conversations and constructed drama of your daily life for fame – like the Kardashians. It’s another thing entirely when a famous musician—one who recently enjoyed a career boost as a judge on an explosively successful talent competition like “The Voice,” say—decides to maximize what’s left of their celebrity mileage with a show all their own.
It’s just as painful when the star (who should have plenty of captivating stories to share and interesting people to head out on adventures with) falls flat and can’t even convincingly repeat the lines he’s fed. When Kylie Jenner starts to look like sincere and substantial, you know you’re in trouble—and Cee Lo could seriously learn a thing or two from the KUWTK crowd.
His Goodie Mob boys could use the help, too. Cee Lo Green’s “The Good Life” follows Cee Lo and Khujo, T-Mo and Big Gipp, the ATL boys he rose to fame with when he was cutting his teeth in a hip-hop outfit pre-Gnarls Barkley. As the news about Cee Lo getting replaced by Pharrell on “The Voice” has long since broken, it isn’t a huge shocker that he’s got a lot of time on his hands, and it seems like the far less familiar faces of his past are just as interested in cashing in on Cee Lo’s fame as he is.
Within the first 10 minutes of “The Good Life,” we follow the band as they get back together and prep for a huge show at LA’s House of Blues, and in the process, they come up with the brilliant plan to start a car service with hot chicks as drivers in skimpy uniforms. Cee Lo’s “You know what? I just came up with a great idea!” delivered to his boys lined up next to his pool is so bluntly and awkwardly staged that you can almost picture the writer responsible for the terrible line doodling a dim lightbulb on a piece of paper while thinking it up.
Auditions ensue, each girl more scantily clad and less intelligent than the last, and Cee Lo and crew fall all over themselves interviewing their hot new drivers poolside. They cut the interviews short to head to practice, but not of a musical variety: Cee Lo’s been tapped to throw the first pitch at a Dodger’s game, and the whole crew takes this very, very seriously, renting out a suburban Little League field in order to crack some jokes about Cee Lo heading to the mound in Louis Vuitton sneakers.
It’s all so predictable and pre-fabricated that it nearly negates the need for a summary, but here it is: The silly girls driving cars are bad at their jobs, Cee Lo gets some goofy advice from a kid about how to pitch a baseball (“Just aim for the nuts!”), he doesn’t pull a 50 Cent at Dodgers Stadium and Goodie Mob goes on to kill the show at the House of Blues, even though it looked like Cee Lo killed a Muppet in order to wear the hat he chose for the big night out.
The only word that comes to mind to describe the whole slap-happy, artificially sweetened mess is “embarrassing,” and it’s actually kind of sad to witness. This isn’t some one-hit wonder desperate for attention; this is an a man with actual talent who’s contributed some fantastic songs to the American pop canon, one who should’ve enjoyed the spotlight “The Voice” provided longer than he did.
In the opening sequence to “The Good Life,” Cee Lo smugly declares, “Now that I’m on top of the world, we can do whatever we want!” To say the opposite—that Cee Lo’s apparently scraping rock bottom, and with the cheesy, force-fed reality bullshit to go along with it—would be closer to the truth. After 21 minutes of Cee Lo Green’s “The Good Life,” it’ll take a lot more to convince viewers and fans that Cee Lo and Goodie Mob are topping anything more than a list of has-beens who should’ve stayed away from the cameras.
@fusion