[quote name=\'Matt Ottinger\' post=\'127152\' date=\'Aug 12 2006, 09:00 AM\']I could personally take or leave Starface. It's absolutely a lousy game, but if you're into celeb trivia and the whole People/Us/Enquirer mindset, I can certainly see its appeal. In other words, Travis, while you might not find the material interesting, there may be an audience that does. And at least as opposed to the Dylan-bot, Danny Partridge (I think he should go back to his stage name) is trying to have some fun.[/quote]I don't doubt that there's an audience for the sort of material being used, after all, you can go through the supermarket checkout line and see just how many variations on a theme are passing as magazines these days. Even "Millionaire" spends a week out of their year doing "Celebrity Scoop."
That's not my issue, though. There's two parts to the "game show", the game and the show. Star Face fails on both parts. "World Series..." on VH1 manages to score a passing grade on both counts. The format is something that's been on Seattle radio stations for twenty years or so (down to three questions per side and the "Seesaw" tiebreaker) as "Battle of the Sexes", but the material is at least interesting. The show aspect has interesting teams, and the tense knockout mechanic that builds to a climax by the end of the show.
Star Face had a trio of contestants identifying Dolly Parton from a cropped photo of her chest while Danny gave clues to her. Which is...well, not great, but it would at least be interesting to watch if there were follow-up bonus questions for the first scorer, or a game board with categories to choose from. Give me something besides three rounds of toss-up questions. There's no "show" at all.
The third thing, Danny does seem to be at home with the celebrity-driven format, and in the one episode I saw he was able to poke fun at his own status in that realm. He's absolutely the right kind of host for the program, but that's about the only good thing about it, and only moderately so at that.
