The Best of the Worst: Shark Tank
I don't think that enough people appreciate the virtues of bad media. I spend FAR more of my time watching awful television and movies than I do watching anything that I genuinely think is good. And if there's anything I love, it's bad reality television. In this new series, "The Best of the Worst," I'll be exploring some of my favorite guilty pleasure reality TV shows. This week, I'll be ruminating on the popular ABC series, "Shark Tank."
Briefly, if you're unfamiliar with the show, each episode consists of three or four entrepreneurs who pitch a product or business to a panel of investors - the "sharks." In exchange for an investment, they're willing to sell off a negotiable percentage of their business to one or more of the sharks. The proposals featured on the show range in quality from the impressive to the pathetically ill-thought-out.
Guess which end of the spectrum this falls on.
"Shark Tank" is entertaining because it covers a lot of bases. One aspect of it - the aspect that well-adjusted people watch the show for, I assume - is the heartwarming feeling of seeing a resourceful yet needy individual land a deal that's going to make them rich. Another aspect of the show is seeing someone who clearly doesn't know what the fuck they're doing crash and burn, and watching the hope in their eyes fade and die on national TV. The show is ostensibly about making people's dreams come true, but in actuality, it's more often a show about crushing people's dreams with the force and intensity of a dying star. A considerable portion of the contestants are obviously not ready to stand up to any scrutiny at all, which calls into question how the producers of the show are vetting these people before throwing them to the sharks.
Pictured: the death throes of a dream.
The sharks include businessman and Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban, FUBU founder Daymond John, and Lori Greiner (known on the show as "the Queen of QVC" - because apparently selling shit on a basic cable shopping channel qualifies you as an investment expert). Each episode, they sit in a row of plush chairs and hear out people's investment propositions, and then proceed to belittle, bully, and humiliate the people whose entrepreneurial spirit they claim to admire. The most common recourse that the contestants have to winning some sympathy is to trot out a sob story, often apropos of nothing. A typical exchange might go something like this:
Mark Cuban: "So, tell me about how you came up with this idea."
Contestant: "My dad passed away when I was a kid, and I just want to honor his memory with this product!" (cue tears)
This will be followed by a dramatic change in music, change in tone from the sharks, and at least two offers from the sharks where before there seemed little prospect. Mark Cuban will likely declare that the contestant in question is "the embodiment of the American dream" - a phrase he is fond of and uses liberally. "The American dream" is an important aspect of Shark Tank, and indeed the entire show is a love letter to the institution of Capitalism - a love letter that occasionally gets pornographic in it's intensity, as the show constantly implies that money can indeed buy happiness, as long as that money also buys a halfway decent percentage of equity and a respectable valuation.
But I must return to the "sharks" themselves. The panel of investors never miss an opportunity to portray themselves as the highest authority on all economic matters, but after watching a pretty considerable amount of the show, I'm a little skeptical. On every deal they make, they assure the contestant that they will be extremely hands-on in the business...but seeing as the show is in it's eighth season, and each shark has made dozens of investments by now, in addition to whatever existing businesses they're involved in, I don't see how they could possibly have time for any kind of personal involvement. Hell, I don't see how they have time to do between twenty and thirty episodes of the goddamn show every year if they're all encumbered in so many enterprises.
Beyond that, the advice they give is...inconsistent at best. If a contestant has gotten their product in retail stores, they haven't gotten into enough stores. If they HAVEN'T gotten it into retail stores, but are planning to, going into retail is the stupidest thing they could do. If a shark isn't a likely customer for the product, they'll back out. Mark Cuban has backed out on multiple golf-based pitches because he hates golf - and apparently doesn't realize that not everybody else on the planet agrees with him.
If a shark makes an offer, and the contestant takes just a little bit of time to think about it - because, you know, the future of the thing they've dedicated their life to hangs in the balance - the shark will declare them indecisive and back out. When negotiatiing, they never fail to give the impression that they're the most strategic business partners in the entire fucking world, despite the fact that that's clearly not true. Of all of them, Mark Cuban is far and away the wealthiest, and he's no Mark Zuckerberg.
The show is often exploitative towards it's contestants, glorifies capitalism and wealth to a disgusting degree, equates money with happiness, is capable of being sickeningly sentimental, and elevates a handful of rich assholes to the status of visionary genius...and for those reasons, I'm out.
"Shark Tank" airs on Fridays on ABC.
