Review: 'The Singing Office'

There have been a couple of dozen reality TV shows that are some variation of the same premise. Uncover some hidden talent from a group of "average" folks (singing, dancing, filmmaking, home design, cooking) and have them compete for money or a job.

The hidden singing talent category alone is plentiful enough to fully stock a complete cable network. So if you're going to roll out a new singing competition TV series, it had better be distinctive.

By that criteria at least, TLC's new reality series "The Singing Office" is different, since at least in the first episode, none of the finalists seem to possess much actual singing talent.

The series is co-hosted by Mel B. and Joey Fatone (who also co-produced the show). They visit individual offices, "surprise" employees with singing auditions, and pick five people they believe have the best voices in the workplace. Each team then learns a song and some matching dance moves before they square off against each other in front of a live audience. The winner moves on to a semi-final round, with the chance to win $50,000.

The workplace segments are about what you would expect. A bunch of people singing snippets of songs, before the teams are picked. And you've certainly seen the rehearsal segments before on a dozen other shows. Some contestants can't learn the dance moves, some have trouble with the harmonies. But ultimately they get it together just in time for the live performance.

The problem for me was that in the first episode, both teams were shockingly bad. I'm not expecting to hear the next unknown singing star, but honestly, a couple of the contestants sounded more like they were being tortured than performing. Granted, giving office workers "Respect" and "ABC" to sing wasn't exactly fair to the contestants. But the final results were just astoundingly painful to hear.

And that's the problem with "The Singing Office." If you're asking audiences to sit through 50 minutes of build-up, then your final performances don't need to be perfect. But they do need to be entertaining.

I think I'll be skipping this one in the future.

"The Singing Office" premieres on TLC on Sunday, June 29th, 2008.