Celebrities go head-to-head with civilians who hate them to win their “haters” over. Hosted by Mario Lopez, H8R is from Horizon Alternative Television with executive producers Lisa Gregorisch-Dempsey (“Extra”), Jeremy Spiegel (“Extra”) and Mario Lopez. – The CW
30 out of 100
So, we have to admit that this show had us for about ten minutes because, well, any segment involving Snooki is invariably funny for a variety of reasons. One, she actually is very quick-witted and has excellent comedic timing and two, you never know what nutty thing Snooki being Snooki will result in. And true to form, Snooki was very funny and her hating, non-celebrity counterpart was equally as funny right out of the gate, as well. And that’s when the whole ridiculousness of the premise of the show catches up with it and it falls off the cliff.
Full Pilot Episode
Let’s talk about that premise, shall we? It’s a little more than The CW’s description would indicate. If it was just about the “celebrities” (and we use that term loosely however we are sad to see that Eva Longoria is officially a has-been) confronting their anti-fans because if it was (as we were led to believe during the first ten minutes), that would be a show worth watching provided they cast it with characters like Snooki and her hater. It would be like watching a show that was comprised up of nothing but bad American Idol auditions with only Simon Cowell in the room. Great idea, right? Well, we can only dream, apparently, because the real premise has far more to do with the nobody-celebrities kissing the asses of the bigger-nobody anti-fan as they try to win them over and make them change their low opinions of them. The result is an hour-long program that seems like an episode of Blind Date without the awesome pop-ups and animations.
The biggest problem with the show is that it’s a complete contrivance and one big “Why The F*ck?”
- W.T.F. do the celebrities give a crap about one dopey person’s opinion of them?
- W.T.F. do the “haters” care so much about celebrities to begin with that they go so far as to dedicate a portion of their life to their hate for celebrity-X?
- W.T.F. as an audience are we supposed to care about any of this?
The producers of this show obviously didn’t think about any of the above considerations before pitching this and obviously the geniuses over at The CW didn’t either when they greenlit it for their Fall Prime Time lineup but the odd thing about it is that despite the problems mentioned, God help us, the show actually could work if they had anyone that knew a damned thing about casting for reality shows working on the production team.
One of the main ingredients to the success of any scripted show is how well the characters relate to the audience and how well the actors can make those characters come alive and relate to the audience. There is no difference with reality shows, however with reality shows, the actor and the character are the same person and it’s far more complex to find a person that’s not only a good relatable character but a good performer as well. This show sucks at doing this and they tricked us with Snooki and her hater because we know she can pull it off and, like we said, for ten minutes so could her hater counterpart. But the truth is revealed about how stupid and bad this show is with the Jake Pavelka segment where he shows himself to be as exciting as a pile of wet newspapers and the hater is possibly the most annoying twenty year-old brat ever on the history of television. She may spawn her own series, H8R H8R’s where TV-Tastic readers spend an hour complaining about the stars of the show H8R despite that the fact they don’t know the haters and the haters have zero influence on their day-to-day life.
And holy crap, who’s brilliant idea was it to make this show an hour long? The longer you drag this show out the more of an opportunity the audience has to come to their senses and realize how bad it is and it is really bad. What seemed like funny jabs in the beginning (the hater referring to Snooki as a “drunk donkey” was pretty funny, we have to admit) quickly becomes mean-spirited and uncomfortable and there’s only so much an adult audience can take of it as it gets very stale.
We recommend passing on this and we don’t expect it to survive past mid-season up against The X Factor.
You can watch new episodes of H8R, here.
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February 28, 2013 (Burbank, CA) – After five seasons of new loves, old flames and shocking betrayals, the stars of 90210 will bid farewell to the world-famous zip code, it was announced today by Mark Pedowitz, President of The CW. With seven original episodes left to air, the show will sign off with a series finale on Monday, May 13 (9:00-10:00 p.m. ET).
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