Green Screen Show

I've seen the first episode of this and to quite honest, I don't like it. Drew Carey is, as ever, consistently unfunny and barely manages to raise a smile. The animation is good but does not interact with the action very well. The performers are OK, Colin is always funny but his Whose Line? partner Ryan Stiles is missing, probably because he doesn't want to be associated with poor TV. The American audience scream when they find something funny, which is still very annoying and half the reason the US version of Whose Line? was not as good as the original.

The point of Whose Line? was that it was imporvised, they didn't have artists taking the recorded footage away and thinking about something funny to go with it.

My suggestion: go back to Whose Line?, get rid of Carey and have a regular guest pattern.

The use of the technology on the Green Screen Show is very clever but looks like a lot of hard work. As others have written though, the concept of drawing in details later definitely clashes with the whole premise of improv. This is two halves that don't come together.

Firstly, the improv: the performers are doing their thing ad-hoc, and they're funny. They have a live audience that laughs at their jokes.

Secondly, you have brilliant animation. This would be great in its own right, but it has no live audience (which is fine for animation, ordinarily, but here it doesn't work).

The reason this combination feels so odd is that you can't shake the knowledge that the studio audience are only seeing the improv, and only laughing at the improv, whereas we (the home audience) get to see the added detail and jokes - which have no audience laughing at them. The result is the same uncomfortable feeling you get when you realise that a sitcom has a laughter track (canned laughter).

Great effort, but the format (Whose Line is it Anyway) wasn't broke, so why try to fix it?

Whose Line Is It Anyway was excellent, but here the special effects just distract the viewer from what made it so good. This seems like nothing but a showcase for the technical possibilities. The animations and sounds don't add anything useful to the scenes at all. It makes you feel like you're reading a book with all the events already imagined in your head as acted out by cartoon characters.

Most of the actors are still doing a good job. Colin Mochrie stands out every now and then even without Ryan Stiles. Unfortunately most of the time even his talent is wasted when wrapped in cartoons. Drew Carey's best talent is not in improvising, but here he's taken a bigger role in the games as well.

It's nowhere near as funny as Whose Line Is It Anyway.

Being a huge fan of Whose Line is it Anyway (both the British and American versions), I kept counting down the days until Drew Carey's Green Screen show had its debut. When it finally was showed, I was a little disappointed with the comedy - there were many boring parts. However, the technical aspects were amazing! I absolutely loved the animation. It really looked good, especially the 3D graphics in "Zeppelin".

Something I didn't like was the way they laid out the commercial time. There would be one game, then a commercial, then a game, then a commercial and so on. The total time of the pilot episode turned out to be 20 minutes (as compared to other 30 minute shows which run around 23 minutes).

I was hoping that the second episode would show some other games that worked, but it only showed the same games, some working and some not working.

The third episode will air next Thursday, and I am going to try my best to enjoy it fully. I think that after the first season, if the show gets picked up again, they are going to have to work out the kinks. Hey - even "Whose Line" had it's bad points, and I am hoping that the Green Screen Show will fix its problems and get better.

As of now, the show is okay, but it has the potential to be so much better.

-Ken

I really liked the Green Screen Show. It was kind of shaky at first but as the shows went on and the performers (and animators) got in the groove it became really enjoyable. The lack of Ryan Styles would have been a big black eye were it not for newcomer Jeff B. Davis. That guy is hilarious. No offense to her, but Kathy Kinney is the only performer I don't like. She seems to have been thrown in there as a favor from Drew to get some work. She doesn't seem to have any real improv skills. The show does take away the raw imagination of the Whose Line is it Anyway's style but the overt goofiness of the props drawn in make up for it. With a little more polish this could become a great show....if it ever makes it back to TV.