Flashbacks assume that your audience is nostalgic for those people and their antics

I'm trying not to repeat myself at great length in these posts about the Second City "reality" series from Canada. But with every new episode, a picture keeps forming in my mind of producers tearing their hair out in an editing room. As they realize they simply don't have enough top-line material to fill an hour.

Tonight, this lack of anything better to show us led to a bizarre 10-minute (or so it seemed) sequence. The final three contestants moped around the loft provided them, giving desultory remembrances of those who've been cut. This led to flashbacks from previous episodes.

Oh, for Pete's sake. Flashbacks assume that your audience is nostalgic for those people and their antics. For any and all producers who may be looking in, I've got news for you...

The new rule for the series is people will still be eliminated, so they're out of the running for the bright and shiny prize at the end of the series...but they're still going to stick around and be team players.

That's got to be the most Canadian thing I've ever seen in my life, eh?

Other than that, this week's episode was just more of the same. The company members-and I don't just mean the newbies, I mean the supposed professionals-tried to be funny. But, well, I have seen children's theatre productions of Godspell that were funnier than this.

If this is what Second City has come to, maybe it's time to revive the old joke from Mame about marriage: It's a great institution, but who wants to live in an institution? It keeps bringing to mind something I remember reading in a playwriting book, that a playwright should continually ask himself about what he is writing:

And what is the audience doing all this time?

I no longer have any dogs in the hunt, BTW-my current favorite, Jeannie, chose to "throw herself in the shredder" last night. Offering herself for elimination rather than standing in an "improv-off" with Kayla Lorette.

I'd rather it had been the other way around, but again, this is no reflection on their respective skills, being as I've been given little or no chance to really evaluate those. I'm just going on whim. As usual, we weren't given more than a glimpse of any sketches in the works...

PS: Ali Rizvi, the musically ignorant fellow from last week, was cut from the official running, and I'm perfectly happy with the way that went...

PPS: In one of the sketches seen in part, Megan McDowell was given the character name Annabel, entered, and began making out with Jeannie Cole. I consider this a crass attempt to bribe me.