Inexplicable TV Review: Every Bar Rescue episode ever

Jon Taffer.

About two years, I wrote about one of my favorite reality TV shows, Hotel Impossible. Spoiler alert! It’s still an incredible show, and it finished up its sixth season in November. That season is downloadable from iTunes, and season seven premieres within the next few months, according to the Internets.

But, my focus today isn’t on that wonderful show. Instead, it’s on Bar Rescue, which has gotten really stale and boring. The main issue, as I see it, is that they ‘unfortunately’ hit upon a major controversy when they did a show about a pirate-themed bar. It was a huge mess, but, it was sort of the beginning of the end, as the whole thing ultimately felt a bit staged and destined for failure.

The owners were clearly delusional and probably beyond help. However, Jon Taffer’s theme was also a complete dud, and they had to have known that replacing a pirate theme with a corporate theme – literally – was a recipe for disaster. I think they went through with it anyway though, knowing it would be a good TV.

The problem now though is that every episode is an attempt to recreate that ‘shock’ from the pirates episode. It’s 45 to 50 minutes of Taffer yelling at an owner for unsafe liquor service, obvious sexual harassment or ridiculously dirty kitchens. All of these are valid concerns, but the show was much better in earlier seasons, when there was a focus on the business aspects. (i.e. How do you properly setup a bar menu? What are the demographics of an area? What’s the best food to serve with beer?)

Anyway. The show returns on March 6, per Wikipedia, with its 100^th episode. (Actually, it’s 101, but one episode won’t ever air because of bizarre circumstances.) However, if you’re looking for better “turnaround” television, Hotel Impossible and The Profit (CNBC) are much more compelling. I’ll have more on the latter show in a future blog.

Side note – If you do like Bar Rescue, or liked it at one point, one site definitely worth checking out is Bar Rescue Updates. It’s maintained by a fan of the show, and it’s quite thorough, since other viewers submit news items and other tips.

The picture of Taffer is from his website.

Inexplicable TV Review: Hotel Impossible Is An Incredible Show You Should Be Watching

 If you’re a fan of the ole renovation, remodeling and reshaping “skill” reality TV shows, then you need to be watching Hotel Impossible. You need to be watching it because I am a connoisseur of all of these shows, and let me tell you, it’s the best one by far, which is weird and inexplicable because it gets no publicity, and I think it airs about once a month at 2 a.m. on the Travel Channel or something. (Reality check: It’s actually Mondays at 10 p.m., but yes, Travel Channel.)

For some reason, you might decide that you do not want to take my word about this show’s wonderful quality. In that case, I have several retorts. Firstly, you can check out clips here. For something I recommend, here’s him checking out a 1970s style room in the Catskills.

What should be immediately apparent from the clip is that the show has a slightly relaxed tone as compared to the hyperbolic mania of Robert Irvine, Gordon Ramsay and John Taffer’s offerings (Kitchen Impossible, Kitchen Nightmares and Bar Rescue, respectively). With most of these “improvement” shows, they start out focusing on the renovation aspects before giving into episodes about DRAMA as time goes on. You could call this Real World syndrome, as the novelty of “strangers living together!” erodes into “strangers forced to work together!” and finally “strangers forced to drink, fuck and fight together!”

Hotel Impossible is still in that sweet spot of mostly just focusing on the host, Anthony Melchiorri, fixin’ up horrible hotels. It could be the fact that seasons only seem to run about 10 episodes, but that hasn’t gotten formulaic yet for me through three seasons. Yes, they have the contrived aspect of “Will the designer finish the renovation?” every episode, but the problems at the hotels are varied enough from episode to episode to keep me interested.

Examples of these problems? Alcoholic owners, people trying to turn over 200 rooms with no previous hotel experience, cheapskate owners who can only identify short-term money savings, improper housekeeping standards, horrible attached restaurants, and in the most recent new episode, the afore-seen Catskills resort that was staying open in the winter despite no customers, because it was a million miles away from a proper ski range.

To me, there is always a balance that producers of these shows need to strike between accurately portraying the issues a business faces, and actually having enough footage to make for a viable episode. I’ve always been far more into the slower, less dramatic shows, like the UK version of Kitchen Nightmares and, currently, Hotel Impossible. The other shows on the air now have veered too much into obviously staged drama, or they don’t focus enough on the nuts and bolts of the changes. Bar Rescue used to be a lot better at showing you why Taffer was doing something, whereas now, it’s normally like 40 minutes of him yelling at someone.

Casey Noble [left] and Blanche Garcia.

 There is also one prurient reason that the show is appealing to male viewers – All of the designers are attractive ladies. And by this, I mean Casey Noble and Blanche Garica. They are sassy, and all sorts of all-right. (Ladies, they do also usually have some sort of hunky construction guy at various sites, but no, there isn’t anybody on the Robert Irvine gunshow level.)

The picture of Noble comes from this thread on an IGN board. Garcia’s photo from comes this blog, which republished or scanned a newspaper article about one of the renovations.

Small follow-up from browsing about on YouTube – It looks like there is a UK show called The Hotel Inspector that might have served as an “inspiration” for this one. So, looks like I have some more cheesy reality shows to watch!