My six favorite things about The Superstars

ABC's reality competition series The Superstars has come and gone. Purportedly a grueling competition among athletes and celebrities in male/female pairs, the end result was a comical attempt to inject drama and athleticism into what was clearly a leisurely two-week Bahamian vacation for everyone involved.

The Superstars received little fanfare, and surely ranks among the worst reality shows of all time, but count me among those who will remember it fondly. Here are six reasons why:

6. The single funniest moment of the series:

John Saunders: "We're here at the Atlantis basketball court, but sorry Lisa [Leslie], there will be no dunking in this one. I know you did it in the WNBA, but not here at The Superstars."
[A little later, during a warm-up montage, we see Terrell Owens easily dunking off an alley oop.]
Owens: "I'm not a stranger to basketball...I played in high school, played in college. That's what I do in my spare time, but I'm not a professional...[makes the smuggest face I've ever seen]...like Lisa."

5. The practice of referring to the participants by first name, sometimes with intelligence-insulting epithets, like they were just another bunch of surname-lacking Wipeout contestants.

4. John Saunders' narration, clearly written for an imaginary audience of toddlers with severe short-term memory loss. Incidentally, we now have conclusive proof that you cannot create excitement simply by excitedly raving about the suspense and intensity of a hypothetical competition that in no way resembles the lackadaisical jog-fest unfolding on screen.

3. Dan Cortese's apparent insistence that his name be pronounced trisyllabically. I like to think that Cortese made this a condition of his appearance on the show, leading the producers to put up a half-assed search for another male celebrity before sighing and giving in.

2. The competitions themselves, which could only have been less grueling if everyone was given amphibious golf carts. Here is a complete list of what the competitors were asked to do, in chronological order:

-Run/bike for one mile.
-Kayak a quarter mile, as many as three times.
-Sprint 100 yards, as many as six (6!) times.
-Long jump, twice (the first was just for practice).
-Swim/run 200 yards.
-Spend one minute shooting baskets--rebounding optional.
-Run two-thirds of a mile.
-Bowl.
-Ride around on a jet ski.
-Shoot arrows at a target.
-Climb a 36-foot wall.
-Paddle a canoe for 10 minutes or so.
-Manually reel in weighted-down ropes.
-Complete a convoluted "triathlon" consisting of a short run, a short swim, stepping over or crawling under a row of unintimidating obstacles, tandem surfboard paddling, and an even shorter run. Total distance: about one-third of a mile.

That's 14 events, competed over about as many days. Only nine of them required even a minimal display of endurance, and none reached the level of strenuousness of, say, running a 5K. One of them, as noted above, was freaking archery.

And of course, appearing at the end of each episode, was the obstacle course--a short series of uninteresting non-challenges, with the lone exception of the cargo net, which was only interesting to the extent that it forced the viewer to consider that some network executive decided people might like to see washed-up athletes and sort-of-celebrities struggling with a discernible lack of desperation to disentangle themselves from a cargo net.

1. Bode Miller. More specifically, ABC's unwavering portrayal of Miller as a strategic mastermind. Sure, Bode seems like a smart guy--I certainly never got the impression that he was at risk of being outwitted by, say, Baywatch star David Charvet. But most, if not all, of his brilliant strategizing could easily have been mistaken for lethargy.

Why try really hard for first place, Bode says to his teammate, when we can try kind of hard for second? Why inconvenience ourselves with a brisk jog when we can take it easy and be rested for whatever minimal exertion is asked of us tomorrow? Why spend all afternoon sprinting across the beach? Now that third place is locked up, we can just relax and enjoy the weather--but let's do it in a way that makes it look like we're playing incomprehensible mind games with the other teams.

Bode rode this commitment to calculated nonchalance all the way to the final, in the process doing the seemingly impossible. The man once best-known for exuding laziness and indifference while failing to meet the nation's expectations has reinvented himself as a cunning schemer whose drive to win will stop at nothing--up to and including diabolical displays of, well, laziness and indifference.