Kings of Pain - Nov 13

Obligatory disclaimer: real life sucks. Yesterday, (Tuesday, Nov 12, 2019), I went across the entire Toronto for an afternoon doctor’s appointment… only it was not. Somehow, I became bumped to a late Friday morning (Nov 15, 2019), so I am going to do it all over again. I hate this shit. At least, family did not try to make it worse, one way or another. Hallelujah for small mercies is all I can say. Now onto the TV shows.

We are talking about the new live-action show, ‘Kings of Pain’, which has also premiered on Nov 12, 2019, on the History channel, (history-dot-ca on the Internet). We have already discussed a different show from this channel, ‘Forged in fire’, and that is really an AWE me/Man-at-Arms YouTube show meeting some sort of a cooking show, ‘Chopped’, maybe. People forge knives, hatchets, other weapons, using materials provided by the show hosts – some people like it, others don’t, but the show IS original in its’ approach, let’s be honest. ‘Kings of Pain’ – not so much.

Instead, ‘Kings of Pain’ are a clear rip-off of the ‘Brave Wilderness’ YouTube & TV show that stares Coyote Petersen and his cohorts. Just like the latter, the hosts of ‘Kings of Pain’ are getting stung and bitten by various creatures; in the series’ premiere, this went towards the executioner wasp and the warrior wasp. (Admittedly, I am not sure about the goliath birdeater tarantula, but)…

The main difference is that Coyote dedicated an entire episode to each creature – yes, it was only 15 to 20 minutes long on average, but the truth is, the plot of such an episode is actually quite limited: Coyote would capture the insect, it would bite or sting him, he would suffer, the end. Not a lot to proceed on here, and a lot of it was occupied by Coyote’s theatrics – the man is an actor, and the fact that he does gets stung for real does not change it.

By contrast, the hosts of ‘Kings of Pain’ do not do those theatrics as well at all – they get stung or bitten, they yell and flail, the end – and the next shot shows them calmly discussing it at a campfire. Plus, they constantly break the fourth wall by showing their camera crew, medical assistants, and so on – ‘Brave Wilderness’ didn’t do it on such a regular basis. Score another one for ‘Brave Wilderness’.

Am I biased? Well, yes, but the truth is that what ‘Kings of Pain’ are doing? ‘Brave Wilderness’ did it first. The latter show is not without its’ own flaws, and is aimed primarily at children as audience, but grownups can enjoy it too. ‘Kings of Pain’ are trying to aim at the grown-ups instead, but it still comes across as second best – in this week’s episode, (‘Nightmare in a Box’), the show’s hosts were shown to be stung and bitten by two different wasp species and the goliath bird-eating spider, yet somehow it was depicted as a less exciting and a more pompous, (in a pseudoscientific way), version of the ‘Brave Wilderness’ ‘Coyote getting stung’ story arc. That is life for you. Anything else?

In the promo for the upcoming ‘Vikings’ season, we get to see the titular characters face-off against… the Turco-Mongols, (or whatever they are called now). Sigh. In real life, the proper Scandinavian Viking culture vanished quite a while before the Turco-Mongols had reached the lands of Rus and Europe proper, so this ‘clash of East and West’ is historically anachronistic and is about as realistic as GoT’s Dothraki coming to Westeros as part of Dany’s forces – but the ‘Vikings’ historical inaccuracies were discussed at length in the past by much more knowledgeable people than me, so let us drop it. We know that the Vikings are going to win anyhow, simply because it is their show, and not the Turco-Mongols’. Ah well, this is TV for you – whether it sucks or not, it usually is not realistic.

…This is it for now. See you all soon.