All of which makes Shark Tank, now in its fifth season, a little hard to consume simply as entertainment, though it’s often highly entertaining on a week-to-week basis. On the show, adapted for American television from a Japanese reality format, inventors, creators and small-business owners try to extract money from a panel of venture capitalists, known on the show as “sharks,” in exchange for some percentage of ownership. The sharks hear from teenagers and MDs, parents and cowboys, beat cops and football players, and barefoot runners and homeless women. Each makes their case, describes their product or service with as much sales brio as they can muster, and waits hopefully for a shark to make an offer. Perhaps half the time, or maybe a bit more, people walk away with nothing. When the sharks do make a deal with a contestant, it’s usually in return for a much greater share of equity than the contestant was hoping to part with. Businesses that are already successful tend to attract investments. Businesses that have yet to prove themselves typically don’t get cash. Money, in short, goes to where money is, a rule of thumb that’s unlikely to surprise anyone.
You’d expect the show to get boring once you pick up on this pattern, but it doesn’t.Shark Tank shows people using their brains, in an SAT sort of way, much more than the average reality show. Every time the sharks hear a new pitch, they cross-examine the contestant on two fronts. First come the questions about the product itself: How does it work? What makes it different? Might that power cord pose a safety hazard to kids? Couldn’t a competitor just nail some boards together like this and make a cheaper version? If the contestant gives answers that satisfy the sharks, then the number grilling begins. What are your sales to date? How much did you net? What does it cost to acquire new customers? What’s your plan for growth? We get to see both the sharks and the contestants thinking on their feet, and along the way we learn about royalty structures, franchising strategies, the different categories of intellectual property, and other MBA-ish topics that we might have missed during our undergrad years reading Jane Jacobs.
Another pleasure of Shark Tank is the never-predictable nature of the business proposals themselves. Here are some of the hundred or so products pitched over the course of the fourth season: A tiny spatula with which you can dig uncooperative makeup out of the bottle. An ’80s-style arcade game console with a tap on the side that dispenses beer. A home tattoo removal kit that purports to break down the ink in your skin with halogen lights. An individually packaged waffle, to be sold at convenience stores, that contains as much caffeine as three cups of coffee. On Shark Tank, some ideas are good, some are bad, and some utterly mystify, but it’s heartening just to see so many ideas, presented back to back and by people who believe in them completely. (...)
You don’t need to watch too many scenes like this to realize that the sharks themselves are one of the less compelling aspects of Shark Tank. They’re certainly not as interesting as the producers seem to think. The sharks are the one element that’s constantly foregrounded, from the title on down: each episode begins with a montage explaining who they are and how they made their millions, and it’s not uncommon, following an emotionally charged pitch, for the camera to linger on the sharks’ bickering and bantering, rather than following up with the contestant who may have just made or lost the most important deal of her life. This emphasis on the house millionaires is one of the show’s greatest errors, because the fortunes and feelings of the sharks can never be a real engine of drama. Each shark, every episode, starts out rich and ends up the same way.
by Alex Eichler, N+1 | Read more:
Image: uncredited
