So I've now seen three seasons of the Oxygen network's
Best Ink and I'm starting in on season three of Spike's
Ink Master. These are both the exact same show, but to pretend like I haven't been wasting my time, I'd like to do an monster cockysis of each. That will also be a waste of time, except now
you get to be involved by wasting your time reading this dross. So let's get started!
What's the format?The format is the exact same for both shows, which shouldn't be surprising because they've both been lifted from Top Chef. It's a standard elimination show, meaning that one person goes home every week, except all the weeks where they declare an armistice and send nobody home or else are so furious that they send multiple people home. It's always a format point to pretend like these special eliminations aren't built in to the show's scheduling, but are purely based on the whims of the judges.
Also like Top Chef, each episode starts with a "flash challenge" where there's a quicker, stupider challenge that won't end in elimination, but will end in "a significant advantage" to the winner. This is, of course, usually crap, and so everyone has to pretend like they're really stressed out painting a bottle of Crystal Skull vodka because they want to be the best at filling time. Later in the show they'll attach a small dollar amount to winning this in an effort to make it seem more meaningful.
Also also like Top Chef, winning the host-to-god competition thing each day gets you dick. Lose the day and you leave, win the day and you get some music playing behind you fist-pumping and a little interview segment where you talk about how happy you are to be winning.
However unlike Top Chef where the threat of food poisoning from gross sous-vide cooking is your biggest threat, these two shows bring in dozens of "skins" each week to have their body destroyed permanently by meth heads under a time crunch. I'm assuming the pitch in each case is "Hey, do you guys want a tattoo? You get to be on the tee vee!" and then vans of people pull into get things on their skin like
this jellyfish, or
this baboon face or
this lady or
this whatever this is. Point is, lots of people are gonna show up, and some of them will just get fucked up.
How are they different?Staff, primarily.
Best Ink has three judges. There's
a pompador with a man attached to it,
a lady not interesting enough to make a joke about and
what would happen if you carved a Bratz doll out of collagen. The producers worried that these three people might not look ridiculous enough, so they do all their judging from
this chair. These three judges are sufficient regulars, and so Best Ink decided they would not have a host. By which I mean, they hired
Pete Wentz to pretend to be their host, and relied on him to be so free of charisma that you can question if he's there even when he's the only thing on screen. At those times, there's just this fleshy color that's wrapped in a sweater lazily attempting the semaphore for "I am human". Before Wentz, they had
this American Idol contestant pretend to host the show, but she fogged up a mirror by breathing on it and was fired.
Ink Master on the other hand does have a host and his name is Dave Navarro, who looks like
this. Dave's job is to show up to work wearing a different Christian Death t-shirt and ask other people what they think. The other people in this case are two judges:
a gold prospector in a skate shop and
Unmagical David Blaine.
Also, because of the network's they are on, both shows do their damndest to pander to their own audience. Oxygen's Best Ink will take great effort to tell the personal stories of their skins, such as "I want to be a musician and so I want a tattoo of music things" or "My sister is dead so I want a tattoo of a cat" or "My father's alcoholism has marred our relationship. Though I still love and respect him, I hate him for the things he's done to me, and I know that he's imprinted on me an opinion of men that continues to this day, and every time I'm close to forgiving my father for the life he gave us, I ruin yet another relationship because I'm terrified of the vulnerability that closeness affords. Anyway, what's the challenge this week? Zombies? Cool, put a zombie on my thigh." Ink Master's on Spike, so they spend plenty of time in sets commissioned from Fear Factor and and the editors are given a deck of vagely metal sounds, a case of Monster Energy Drink, and the instruction that we shouldn't look at any one thing for more than half a second.
How do they demonstrate a contempt for humanity?Despite the stories told by the skins in Best Ink, both shows have as much disregard for human life as Pol Pot. Each week has a theme put around it (vibrant colors, pinup models, gross shit) and that theme is carried out on living tissue. Participants may come in with some preconceived notion on what they want on their body, but the finer details are largely irrelevant and it's regarded as a failing of the tattooists' interpersonal skills if they can't convince a 20 year old aspiring actress that she totally wants The Green Lantern on her stomach because it's comic book day.
On the notion that this makes it better, the judges serve as rage filled lunatics yelling at the contestants daily about how bad they are at everything. They will occasionally give lip service to the permanence of their mistakes and how this whole tattoo thing is a sacred bond, but of course that's overlooking the fact that these people will end up watching a TV show where a roomful of people complain about how shitty the tattoo they just got is. Ink Master eventually took this a step further and actually implemented a segment of the show where everyone who just minutes ago got a new tattoo sit in a room and discuss who's tattoo is the worst. The creator of that tattoo is chastised, which I'm sure is very comforting to the person who everyone agrees has godawful bullshit on their body forever.
There's also a palpable undercurrent of racism. At several points in the show, they'll point out that color tattoos look more vibrant when placed on pale skin, which is why there's totally nothing wrong with tattooing black people being used as punishment. Any episode where there's a structure to the skin/tattooist pairing ends up with the black guy getting something terrible on his skin.
So... which one is better?Despite the fact that they're the same show, Best Ink is considerably better than Ink Master. Best Ink seems to find the cruelty of the concept an unforeseen side-effect, whereas Ink Master relishes in the terribleness of the experience. Ink Master contestants are told to take their critiques as a growth experience just before being told that all of them are fucking garbage at what they do. And of course they do have a point, the average tattoo is noticeably worse, and based on the heavy drama-focus of the show I'm guessing their more focused on casting fucking douchebags like guys named
Al Fliction and
Mystical Mike and
Kay Kutta.
But, I dunno. I might keep on watching it.
Anyway, you made it to the end of this, so you deserve a reward.
Somebody went on Ink Master and asked to have a her mother's face tattooed on her. As luck would have it, the mother (and her face) was there beside her to act as an invaluable reference to work from, so we can all understand why the end result was this:
