Chris DeLine

Lily Allen & Friends debuted on Tuesday night to a stream of skepticism, The Times‘ Adam Sherwin adding “Lily Allen reduced BBC Three’s average audience for the 10:30pm slot by some 200,000 viewers. The E4 channel attracted a higher share of the target youth audience during the evening. ITV2 attracted more viewers than Allen with an Arnold Schwarzenegger film.” Sherwin also notes that it “was billed as the first television show designed for the social networking generation. But not even Lily Allen could rescue the BBC’s latest attempt to lure the ‘youth’ market.”

While the show’s success rests on Allen’s ability to overcome her non-musical inabilities it also rests on that “social networking generation,” or more importantly – just who the heads at the BBC think the social networking generation may be. The first example of the show’s ineptitude comes in the form of Tay Zonday, who performed a brief rendition of Allen’s smash “Smile” following an equally unenlightening interview.

Call it a criticism on the state of entertainment, or at least an outsider’s view of what the term entertainment may mean in the context of BBC Three, but the sample in the following clip is not what television has the capability of being. The execution is dull, the material is dry, self-serving and unimaginative and for chrissake – is Cuba Gooding Jr. even remotely relevant anymore?! Even during the writer’s strike on this side of the Atlantic late night figureheads such as Stephen Colbert and Conan O’Brien have delivered segment after segment of brilliance – the majority of which subsequently drawing praise from the BBC’s target audience.

If one aspect from Lily Allen & Friends’ debut suggests a quick death to the show it would be the appearance of “YouTube legend” Tay Zonday. His appearance results in a moment of confusion rather than interest as it is honestly depressing to think that “Chocolate Rain” exclusives are still what’s being shat out of television producers’ think tanks months after the social networking generation started to lose interest. Rather than continuing to dig into Zonday (real name Adam Bahner)…though it irked me to no end how he attempted to describe “Chocolate Rain” as a universal theme whereas he once got it right, describing the song for what it is as “something silly”…I will conclude by saying that this show is doomed simply because the market that it is aiming for is in need of fresh, innovative entertainment and the show is certain to fail to deliver. This is a target audience that has no problem with moving on to something new because there is and will always be something more interesting out there and I’d like to think that I’m apart of such an audience…so much so that even I lost interest in this post about three hundred words ago.

[This post was first published by Culture Bully.]