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Comment by michaelt | Hacker News Reader

  I didn't feel like Strip Search was a 
  particularly effective way of finding 
  the best cartoonist in the group.

Typically for reality competition shows the goal is to produce programming that draws in viewers, rather than to find the best competitor.

If 'survivor' wanted to make a show about survival skills they'd use a bunch of ex-marines, mountaineers and woodmen. If 'dancing with the stars' wanted to show the best dancing, they'd get rid of the celebrities and just have professionals. If 'the apprentice' wanted to find people with business skills they'd get candidates smart enough to realize infighting isn't a useful business skill.

I'm not saying I like it, but 'so you think you can dance' certainly has more viewers than the Prix de Lausanne youtube channel. And what's the point in making ideologically pure TV that no-one wants to watch?

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I haven't watched So You Think You Can Dance for a few years now, but at least when I was watching on a regular basis (seasons 3-6 or so), they did exactly what you're proposing they do, e.g. select highly skilled dancers. There were no "This person is bad at dancing but it's funny to watch them be terrible" getting past more than a round or two at the tryouts, and all of the top 20 contenders each season were legitimately talented and hard working professional-quality dancers. SYTYCD gets their quality (or at least did; again, I haven't watched it for a while) by taking very skilled dancers and pushing them out of their comfort zone; you can be skilled at classical ballet, but can you adjust and pull off a hard-hitting hip hop routine? You can breakdance at BOTY, but can you learn to waltz?

That's a very different type of challenge from "You can't dance, and we want to see if you can learn to dance before you explode", and that's part of why SYTYCD is a good show. Obviously it's a reality show and SYTYCD is going to have some compromises (for example, you might argue that the judge selection is suspect, or that the styles and choreographer choices are limited) but it was honestly pretty close to ideologically pure as you could get; the people who succeeded were the people who were good at dancing, not the people who were good at ballet or contemporary or hip hop or ballroom.

I think that's partly because watching great dancers is a very entertaining thing by itself, even to the completely uninformed; the sizzle doesn't need to be manufactured. In fact, SYTYCD helped me learn a lot about the nuances of dance, something I'd been unaware of previously.

On the other hand, I can't see an ideologically pure version of 'So You Think You Can Code' any time soon.

It's still a competition to find the best candidate though. They said that over and over during the show.

Dancing with the Stars finds the best dancer out of the group, even if they're not pros. Survivor ostensibly finds the best survivor out of the group, even if they're not true outdoorsmen.

They say over and over in The Sopranos that Tony Soprano is a mobster. That doesn't make it so in reality - that's just the fiction presented to us for our entertainment. To maintain the fiction, the show doesn't wildly contradict it.

Reality TV is the same - except the fiction is the competition isn't rigged and its primary goal is to find the best candidate. The show doesn't wildly contradict it, it's just not true.

It's a competition to entertainingly find a best candidate. The core mechanic was the elimination round. Anyone who could consistently beat others given a random topic and limited time was likely to win regardless of what happened in the leading-up rounds.

Looking at the strips after the fact, Abby and Katie pretty obviously are writing the best strips. And sure, Abby's is the better of the two, but her concept is harder to distill down to its essence and present - Katie was the only one of the three finalists who was able to competently and interestingly introduce her new strip with just a few sample pages.

If you think they picked wrong, who should have won instead?

(Note that several of the other cartoonists have been hired by Penny Arcade for other tasks such as doing The Trenches and designing pins. So even if you ignore the publicity aspect there were still multiple winners.)

I didn't see enough of their work to judge the early eliminations. They could have been great, I don't know.

Of the last two, Abby should have won IMO.

I haven't had the time to watch this yet, but it seems like they wouldn't let anyone they didn't want to work with on their show.

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