Who doesn’t like getting a sparkly trophy and a little recognition, right? Well, get ready kids, because we’re about to present the winners in our first Channel Surfing Awards, better known (at least in our minds) as the CSAs. Can you feel the tension in the air? And now, without further ado, your host — who also serves as the lone nominator and judge — CT!
In the category of “Great Idea Badly Executed”, the award goes to… 100 QUESTIONS. While the concept is a sound one (a woman goes to a dating service and as she asks each question on their profile, we see the story behind her answer), but everything from the casting to the scripts is miserable. But perhaps the worst decision made by the people in charge of the show was to use not only a laugh track, but one of the most obnoxious ones in recent memory. Nothing points out just how flat a joke is falling like having it punctuated by canned laughter. If there’s one thing we’ve all learned from shows like MODERN FAMILY and COMMUNITY, it’s that we as an audience are now smart enough to know when to laugh.
In the category of “Best DVD To Buy Your Dad For Father’s Day” the winner is…LIFE, the phenomenal series presented earlier this year by The Discovery Channel and currently available from Amazon. The documentary series, narrated by Queen Of All Media Oprah Winfrey, features some of the most stunning nature footage ever caught on film. There are sequences where you will swear it has to be CGI. But as the behind-the-scenes sequences explaining how things were shot will prove, sometimes, you just can’t fake the good stuff.
In the category of “Best Summer Show You’re Not Watching And Need To Be”, the winner is… NBC’s creepy-cool PERSONS UNKNOWN. Every year, people complain about the dirth of summer programming… and then watch THE BACHELORETTE or BIG BROTHER instead of the interesting stuff actually being offered up by the networks. PERSONS UNKNOWN — in which a group of strangers wake up in an abandoned little town to find they can’t leave and their every move is being watched — is part psychological drama, part LOST-like mystery and all intriguing goodness. Go to hulu.com and watch the first two episodes, then tune in Monday night for this week’s incredibly suspenseful outing.
In the category of “Worst Portrayal Of A Blind Person Since GOOD & EVIL”, the winner is… Tammin Sursok as Jenna Cavanaugh on PRETTY LITTLE LIARS. Anyone familiar with Sursok’s work as THE YOUNG & THE RESTLESS’ Colleen knows this girl can act. So we can only assume that bad direction is to blame for the way Jenna cartoonishly pounds the ground with her cane in a way that bears no resemblance to the way actual blind people use theirs. Wonder if the National Federation For The Blind — who infamously picketed ABC over Mark Blankfield’s hysterical if wildly un-PC portrayal of a sight-impaired scientist whose cane was a nearly-lethal weapon on GOOD & EVIL — will have something to say about the teen sudser. 
