its still an amazing idea, the casting just sucked. even Shinji was talking about leaving the first time he got attacked, the house would have been empty by week 4 if they tried it with this group.
Except that the cast was great and got into more scuffles and absolute hatred of each other without the stupid fucking attack therapy just grinding up hours of a day. Basically every fish had some sort of beef with either a contestant or freeloader that wasn't derived from attack therapy. Its universally regarded as the weakest and most boring feature of S2
one of the few things we can look forward to with them letting professionals do the casting is that we'll finally be able to pay these whores to make erotic commissions. /r/GonewildAudio is down the hall and to the left.
Part of the charm of fishtank is that the contestants largely have the same sense of humor and responded to events that in a manner that the audience would find hilarious. Fishtank has such a dedicated audience because its designed specifically for them, getting a group of 10-12 random aspirant actors and actresses out of California wont yield the same responses that the audience wants and expects from them. Sam and Jet tap into a specific brand of transgressive humor that has largely been ignored and attacked since perhaps the late 90s mid 2000s when Howard Stern had left to Sat radio and Opie and Anthony were being ground down and shunted there as well.
The cast of S2 had the same overly blunt and rude nature that the audience has, often times an extremely rude TTS would come in and more or less vocalize what they were thinking at any particular moment and cause them to burst out laughing. The cast being blunt about Nifty smelling like rotten boiled cabbages, shitting on the weird looking fans that cut their hair, Fatty exposing himself to everyone or smelling bad, TTS shitting on Danye by calling him Dumbgay, something that Trish would incessantly use instead of his name, the overt hatred of the LGBT orthodoxy of pronouns. This kind of stuff endeared the audience to the cast in a way that you cannot replicate.
Compare these two moments:
JC:
Tayleigh:
With JC who isn't a fan of the show, has no idea who Sam Hyde is or Fishtank, and doesn't have the same sense of humor as the production crew, leaves the whole segement flat, straight to the point, and with zero fanfare. She provided basically zero platform to hang any sort of jokes or humor off of because she lacks the same terseness and rough edges as the rest of the cast. Whereas with Tayleigh who was a fan of MDE and Sam, immediately starts shitting on the Zipp, has a witty response about what its made of, she then gets stuck trying to parse Summer's bizarre past and current actions into normal people language for Sam to understand only for the conversation to once again switch to her self deprecating and pointing out that she was a fat fuck once because she was eating too much "goy slop" as a teenager, a term both Sam and the audience find funny.
With a casting agency all you're going to get is JC types. People think they're going to get a bunch of Danye level go-getters but they fail to understand that Danye is already within that sphere of transgressive comedy because he works with Alex Stein.
I wanted to post a dozen or so instances of the cast and audience basically being on the same wavelength but the site's upload is fucked at the moment.