Bravo tries to make songwriting interesting

Even Bravo’s hyperactive magical camera elves can’t salvage the fact that songwriting, even among collaborating competitors, mostly looks like 40 minutes of sitting around kvetching.

In its new series “Platinum Hit,” the network did everything in its power to make competitive songwriting seem interesting.

They cast about a dozen hopefuls with strong personalities all but guaranteed to clash. The prize is something like $100,000 and a record deal, and they plunked them down in a pressure-cooker environment with limited escape valves. That and the editing team seems hellbent on highlighting tension, bickering and sniping – especially in the confessionals.

Yes, having learned absolutely nothing from the decades of reality programming at their disposal, the songwriting hopefuls forget that when they’re alone in a room with a camera, that camera is still going to share whatever they decide to spring loose with.

And sadly, as in life, the ones that spout the loudest tend to be the ones you least want to hear from.

Most of the first episode was ego-driven nonsense, which is likely to continue. One of them, Nick, mentioned the late Michael Jackson so often as an inspiration and a muse and in front of so many cameras he could’ve resurrected him.

Which would have stood out, in that it would have been interesting.

They cut to this voluble nonsense so frequently because the actual competition is dull as dry toast.

Collaboration

From an initial challenge, set in the Grammy Museum in Los Angeles, to write a “hook” – a catchy chorus for a song about Los Angeles – they herd these creative types into a room full of musical instruments ... and they sit there.

They converse, and they collaborate. Someone picks up a guitar, and puts it down again. One leaves the room and the others talk about them. Someone contributes an idea, but they didn’t contribute it fast enough. One’s off getting everyone coffee – well, that’s not helping the songwriting! And so on.

But mostly they sit. With a countdown clock – ooo, haven’t seen one of those on every one of these competitions. Ditto the sniping, backbiting and personality conflicts.

And certainly judging the quality of the songs themselves is no less subjective than judging a food or a fashion show, but here we hit a problem.

What a chef does with ingredients and a designer does in the construction of clothing has a tangible quality to it. You can analyze the elements and identify who contributed what to the final product.

In “Platinum Hit,” four teams of three songwriters each wrote four songs about Los Angeles, incorporating the four winning “hooks” from earlier in the competition into four complete songs. Not even the performance is on the line, these artists are assured. The main focus is the songs.

So they sing the songs and that was sort of cool. But it’s a competition, so some team has to win, and the judges praise the winners. Yay, winning teams, yay instantly downloadable winning song.

And then some team has to lose. Now, from four perfectly acceptable songs presented by reasonably talented songwriters hoping to win a competition, the judges identify two of the songs as being the weaker entries and just start ripping them to shreds.

Winners, losers

The judges are show hosts singer-songwriter Jewel, former “American Idol” judge Kara DioGuardi, and there’s a record executive and a producer. They demand the losing teams identify who contributed what elements to the losing songs, and the songwriters are all spinning wildly to throw the failure on their fellow collaborators.

In a matter of minutes, a group of people took what they felt was a good enough song to compete in a songwriting competition in front of a national audience, in a moment of stomach-churning vertigo, begin disavowing any involvement in its coming to be.

One songwriter suggests the one who wrote the hook – that is, the one part the judges seemed to enjoy at any point in the creative process – was the person who contributed the most to this song – or rather, this “song,” this suddenly vile, execrable abomination loosed upon a unsuspecting public.

Jewel gently pointed out that in that case, it was the responsibility of the rest of the team to speak up and fix whatever they felt was wrong.

They decided the guy who’d relied the most on cliches should be the one to go, but why bother? The song deemed the winner was in no significant way better than the song deemed the loser. Besides, we’re in a sufficiently responsive media environment that what ought to happen is they ought to release all four songs on iTunes and the one that sells the most, that’s the one that ought to be declared the winner.

Since the goal is to find the next best-selling songwriter, well, that would probably be a good indicator of who that is.

Certainly better than the judges sitting there quizzing desperate songwriters about their specific contributions to the success or failure of their songs when all they’d need to do is roll the tape.

“Platinum Hit” airs Mondays at 10/9c on Bravo.