Change Your Image
kyleamason
Reviews
Animal Precinct (2001)
Most of the time - just poor people being harassed
Let me start by saying I think that people who torture and harm animals are sick and should definitely be punished. That aside, this program shows these officers and people stretching the definition of "animal abuse" to ridiculous proportions. Before watching this show, my first impression was that it is wonderful that society has taken a proactive stance against people who hurt animals and made a division of law enforcement specifically to stop it. After watching it I have mixed feelings about the people involved.
One episode I remember, some ducks were in a parking lot some guy owned (but was rarely there), and one of them was sick. It ended up dying, and the people on the show were talking about how the results of why the duck died were inconclusive, and they were angry because they couldn't charge the owner with any crimes or tickets. I'm sorry but that's just insane - people now have criminal liability for animals that randomly come on their property and die? The same episode showed these two incompetent officers going after a cat and completely tearing this guy's apartment apart, wantonly destroying his property, and literally throwing boxes of his stuff across the room to get it out of their way.
Some of the shows detail some pretty sick people, but at the same time, some of them go a little too far in their zeal to just find people to prosecute. Many of the shows I've seen, maybe it's just chance, were officers harassing poor people who were kind enough to take what little extra money they had and feed an animal or let it stay on the property. Then fining them or arresting them and acting like these normal, compassionate people who were of meager means and doing what they could were actually sadistic freaks because they couldn't afford to get some stray dog they were leaving scraps for a $8,000 kidney transplant.
Smash Lab (2007)
Mythbusters without personality
This show is a Mythbusters rip off, except with 4 sub-par actors who have no personality, jockeying for horribly generic lines like "Big explosion, that's what I like to hear." Mythbusters is entertaining because everyone on the show has their own distinct personality, and they are all goofy and quirky in their own way, which makes it a very fun show to watch in addition to the great writing and topic selection.
Smash Lab is the exact opposite of this. There are 4 people who are very transparently acting, and worse, all of them are competing to be the "cool" one, the "renegade engineer" personality on the show, the result being just awkward and lame dialog. This also contaminates their body movement; it's hard to describe, but often times they make these weird positions like someone who is trying to act like they are *really* interested in something. As though it was not rehearsed when it obviously was.
Each of them wants to be the one that talks, but the vast majority of the time what comes out of their mouth is either something totally obvious that didn't need to be said, or them trying to develop their own personality, except with really bland comments that are, again, meant to show them off as *the* "cool renegade engineer guy" on the show. "Oh yeah, that baby's burning!"
One of the comments already posted that was particularly acute was about the one woman on the show, "The Scientist." She doesn't seem at all like a scientist, just someone who is obviously acting, who has these awkward "scientific sounding" lines jammed into her mouth. Example, someone will say something plain (and of course, with their trying-to-be-cool personality), "Oh man that's hot stuff," and then she will say "Yes, that translates to 500 degrees Centigrade" for no reason. She especially has annoying fake body movements, like someone will come in with some material, and she will lean in, in this attempt to look interested as a scientist but also sexy at the same time. It's hard to even write this review without repeatedly rolling my eyes.
Everyone and everything on this show is completely transparent and lacking any substance. They try so hard to have personality but they just don't have it. It's really pathetic.