Double your pleasure

Posted by Dan August 30th, 2006 at 04:15pm In Guilty Pleasures Reality

I really wasn't expecting to watch Celebrity Duets.  Really.

But, all of a sudden, when I realized it was on I suddenly felt a need to watch it as if it were the Jake Gyllenhaal Standing There With No Shirt On Show.  And, I have to admit, despite my initial reservations and low expectations, Celebrity Duets delivered.

Here's the setup: we have the usual crop of has-beens (Lea Thompson, Cheech Marin) and never-really-weres (wrestling star Chris Jericho), plus a crop of musical legends with a lot of time on their hands (Gladys Knight, Smokey Robinson).  Last night, each star performed twice with different professionals in front of three judges. 

The judges?  Smiling mormon Marie Osmond, music producer David Foster and (wait for it… wait for it…) the extraterrestrial Little Richard.

Now, let me just say this: Little Richard is going to be a fucking PHENOMENON.  He's the show's Paula Abdul, only even less coherent.  He's a mullet-wearing, bedazzled version of Paula with an even more dizzying array of pills.  He managed to keep it together for about half of the show's 2-hour season premiere, but after the one hour mark he just couldn't keep up and started scatting his criticism ("I was thinking…  child… woooooooo!…  you were just… mmmhmmm…. wooooooo!").

The singing on the show ranged from passable to somewhat ghastly, with the athletes Jericho and gymnast Carly Patterson bringing up the rear.  Jericho's initial country ballad was bad news from note one with his soft and off-key muttering, but then tried to make up for it by running around and jumping ADD-style while Peter Frampton jammed along on the guitar.  It wasn't enough to save him and he was the first star eliminated.

Smokey Robinson and Hal Sparks had a weirdly homoerotic moment on their duet, both of them clad in white tuxes.  I realize the FOX network is a bit more open with their programming, but I was still surprised to see what looked to be a burgeoning May-December interracial gay love affair on primetime.  (And speaking of Smokey, he was freaking me the hell out last night.  He has this look in his eyes like he's either petrified or just about to die.)

The early frontrunners appear to be Queer Eye's Jai Rodriguez (who has a bit of an unfair advantage, seeing as how before he was QE's scenery chewer he also starred in Rent) and Xena's Lucy Lawless.

Finally, watch this clip of Jai performing "Say My Name" with Destiny's Child's Michelle Williams.  For one, it show's how far we've come in forty years from not showing Elvis from the hips down on TV to having a Puerto Rican gay man dry humping an African American Woman and shouting "Say My Name" over and over.   But also, this performance was after Little Richard lost it, so you get a taste of his incoherence.