TAKEN FROM http://www.whitworth.edu/aswc/wwian/9798/414/push.htm
April 14, 1998
Shove "Push" off TV
By Ben Clark Staff Writer
Just in time for National Turn Off Your TV week comes "Push," ABC's new schlock-u-drama about the turbulent life of hard-bodied college athletes. Oh, what troubled lives these hunky guys and gals lead. Drugs. Unprotected sex. Drugs. Big meanie coaches who yell. Drugs. Big meanie fathers who yell. Crybaby jocks who pout and take drugs because people yell at them... . They say imitation is the purest form of flattery, but when a TV show resorts to imitation, the results are just plain uninspired. There is nothing new here. "Push" is "Beverly Hills 90210" with muscles. It is "Baywatch" with sport bras. In the first episode, the track star takes performance-enhancing drugs, the catty gymnast sleeps with her coach, the studly swimmer's ex-girlfriend finds out she's HIV positive, the other catty gymnast sleeps with her English professor and the star male gymnasts dies during a performance. Pity the other actors in this cast of nobodies did not have the good sense to follow his lead. Meanwhile, all the action is interspersed with plenty of shots of great bodies in slow-motion and pensive, brooding Gen-Xers. So much angst. So little time. If a formulaic plot wasn't bad enough, the gawd-awful dialogue is even worse. You have to figure that the writers (and I use that term in the figurative sense) of this show are getting paid something considerably more than minimum wage. You also have to figure that they are college grads who took writing courses where professors forced them to read Faulkner and told them not to use cliches. So here they are, getting paid great money and working in Hollywood. Yet the best they can come up with are lines like: "You gotta get out there and give it everything you got." Or when the drugged-out, fallen gymnast goes down in a coma, the coach runs out and says, "Are you all right?" No, you cheese head, crashing to the floor in a sweaty, unresponsive heap is just part of my new floor routine. Or when the announcer calls out Karen Bradford's name as the next gymnast to compete, her coach leans over to the fetching young woman and declares, "That's you!" No! You're kidding! Quick, somebody shove "Push" over a cliff. This show is just a lame attempt to cash in on the sexploitation TV jiggle market. I'm sticking with "Baywatch."
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