Who knows what FOX Networks Group Africa (FNG Africa) was thinking when it decided that the first locally produced show for its FOX Life (DStv 126 / StarSat 133 / Cell C black 202) channel under its in-house production banner should be about death featuring a so-called psychic. Who knows?
What this TV critic does know from seeing it, is that it looks bad, disjointed, schmaltzed up and fake, uninspiring, and completely beneath what FOX Life is and should be doing.
Instead of doing something different and new programming wise, FOX Life decided to go with the cheap shot TV charlatan genre by adding Spirit - as if viewers haven't had enough of TV gypsies doing tarot card readings for gullible, big-eyed subjects.
After South African viewers have seen SABC3's Crossing Over with John Edwards, kykNET's (DStv 144) Marietta Theunissen and her Die Ander Kant, then even her daughter, Julia Theunissen getting in on the act with her Tussen Twee Wêrelde on VIA (DStv 147), E! Entertainment's (DStv 124) Hollywood Medium with Tyler Henry, TLC's (DStv 135) Long Island Medium with Theresa Caputo and Belinda Silbert who did Making Contact on SABC3 and then an e.tv version that flopped, you have to wonder why FOX Africa decided to do more of this vapid, indistinguishable and empty-calorie, polony television that has no replay value and doesn't add anything to viewers lives.
FOX invited only some press for a type of set visit and reached out to only certain media for interviews, deliberately ignoring others for whatever reason.
There's was no media preview, nor any advance screener episode made available as with other shows - also weird given that it's FOX Life's first local series (channels usually tout their "first of" shows).
Through it, FOX Africa created the distinct impression that it doesn't believe in its own show and possible know itself that it is dishing up a type of TV trash it's not really proud of.
With no background or any background knowledge of the show or Cindy Kruger at all, this review is solely based on having watched the linear broadcast of the first episode as it was shown on FOX Life this week.
It's fine if you've never heard about Cindy Kruger. This one has a notepad and starts scribbling furiously as apparently your dead flock to her - sort of like Coco.
She then "radiates" on levels, and makes a "connection" as she throws statements out there so that those doing a "reading" can find something in their lives to try and relate it to.
Cindy doesn't look Irish, yet Spirit's opening sequence that doesn't fit with how the rest of the show looks, wants to hype up airy Irish mystic qualities and plays like an Enya "Orinoco Flows" music video or an animated Celtic Woman CD cover.
Then we see aerial shots of Cindy walking a Celtic garden maze before all the rest of the setting is suddenly a type of rustic Rustenburg rural charm. It's a big visual disconnect.
The FOX Original Productions then shamelessly manipulates viewers with editing, cuts and music, with Spirit borrowing a lot from the soap/telenovela visual playbook to hype up non-existent drama and characterisation, to try and make the viewer feel things and feel a certain way. Take away the music or turn off the sound and see how the vapid show becomes even more lifeless.
Most hilariously and fakely, Spirit includes drum beats - going "baff, baff, baff" during pregnant pauses to hype up the drama - along with lovely dramatic mood music added after filming to help enhance the spectacle when Cindy does her "radiating" and the dead come to her.
The absence of anything really happening in Spirit, makes it all look even more silly, with the "baff, baff, baff" inserted exactly like when Brooke turns around in The Bold and the Beautiful, but before she tells Ridge that she's leaving him.
After "readings", someone with a steadicam that's deliberately still shaking to visually try and re-enforce how "shook" subjects are after Cindy "radiated" on her levels to make "soul connections", do close-ups.
This is clearly to try and capture the bewilderment of people who can't believe how Cindy knew about tombstones and dead people and to convey a type of temporary "emotionally claustrophobic" feeling to the viewer.
They say don't speak ill of the dead but strangely none of the dead who surround Cindy speak ill of the living. They give Cindy messages but she still has to ask people stuff to see what sticks.
Cindy's home (if it is her home) looks unnaturally spotlessly clean. Perhaps the dead come at night and clean.
Cindy's "radiating" and "readings" obviously takes longer and more time during actual filming but are edited down for punch. Viewers are not given a sense in Spirit of, or shown, what Cindy actually gets/got wrong or that subjects can't relate to (unless of course she's a perfect dead communicator).
Spirit feels and looks like it could and should rather be a regional late afternoon drive-time radio segment with callers phoning in, or would fit better on some community TV channel like GauTV, to whittle away an empty half hour or hour.
It's sad to see FOX Africa selling out with something simple like Spirit for FOX Life when it could invest in actual worthwhile programming that teaches and entertains and is unique to Africa and its female and developmental challenges - instead of cheapening its offering with psychic silliness as if its little more than a traveling TV circus.
Even a plain talk show for FOX Life would have been better than dishing up cheap psychic TV tricks ... baff, baff, baff.
