The Phone: Premiere

The Phone
Tuesdays, 10pm on MTV

The estimable Michael Ian Black once said that David Hasselhoff  “somehow manages to step into piles of turds and turn them into gold. He’s done it for 20 years.” The same can be said of Justin Timberlake: boybands, SNL, Britney Spears…everything he touches turns to gold. So when his newly-produced reality show The Phone debuted on MTV tonight, we as a nation were understandably concerned. Would the old magic be there?

We shouldn’t have worried. The Phone completely delivers. I knew Justin “Dance Biscuit” Timberlake wouldn’t let us down.

A muscled-up version of a Dutch TV show, The Phone combines The Amazing Race and the movie Speed into one glorious high-adrenaline rush. The slick production values, beautiful editing, sweeping shots, and likable cast all melds together to create a show that’s exciting as well as emotionally involving.

The premise is simple: two teams compete for a chance to win $50,000 by engaging in a kind of steroidal Clue. In the premier episode, the operator (the buttery voiced Irish actor Emmett J. Scanlan) calls 2 people, asking them if they want to play a game for $50,000. When they opt in by pressing 1, a car explodes. They are given the charge of finding the bomber before he strikes again. Across town, another team is given the same task, with different evidence to follow.

The hunt begins that involves a ticking clock, high speed chases, and puzzling mind game. The show makes the most of its location (the premier takes place in Seattle), with beautiful use of Rem Koolhaas’ Central Library, the Space Needle, Pikes Place and the wharf. The action is about as much reality as your average Survivor challenge: the contestants know there isn’t an actual bomber, they know the challenges aren’t actually putting them in danger. But the time limits are real, the threat of elimination is real, and the threat of the other team is real. This tension, combined with sharp editing, makes the show legitimately exciting and impossible to turn away from.

Interestingly enough, early reviews of the show have been mixed. Phonesreview.co.uk branded it a “rather irritating MTV reality show,” and The Washington Post went even further, calling The Phone “perfectly awful, perfectly horrid, and perfectly insane.” The criticism, I imagine, stems from the fact that the show is edited to look like a good-old-fashioned Hollywood action movie, when in reality the contestants were coached, cajoled, and consulted every step of the way. But this behind-the-scenes context doesn’t make the action any less enjoyable: as the LA Times pointed out, “(like your above-average Hollywood action film) the momentum carries you through the muddy bits and over the plot holes.”

The producers of The Phone have consciously taken the best aspects of almost all reality shows (The Amazing Race, Survivor, Big Brother, The Mole, Road Rules). The result somehow manages to feel fresh, exciting, and new. And with new plots and new locations in New York and Boston, it seems like the Timberlake magic will keep it that way for some time.