So knowing that I love ‘Miami Ink’’, then ‘LA Ink’, now subsequently ‘NY Ink’ (I even tried watching ‘London Ink’, but that show was godawful) my dad mentioned recently that I should give Spike TV’s new ‘Ink Master’ a watch… and I did.
The judges are tattoo artist Oliver Peck (who actually used to be married to Kat von D), Miami Ink’s own Chris Nunez, and magician vampire-pimp approximation Dave Navarro, who also pulls double duty as the host.
My initial reaction was: “This show is too late”. It missed the whole tattoo reality show curve by at least 4-5 years now. It would be like another season of ‘According to Jim’ suddenly coming back on air (and that show was terrible even back then) But I guess this show is aiming for the “contest” side of “reality television”, so it’s kinda got that going for it. The winning contestant is given the title of “Ink Master” which is about as much of a fake accomplishment as “Pen Emperor“ or ”Toast Overlord”.
The second problem is with the contestants themselves. Where did they actually find these people? More than half of them have weird pseudo-stage names like they’re strippers from Reno: Al Fliction, Heather Sinn, Lea Vindetta, B-Tat, Bili Vegas (who is a dude?)
Each contestant has their own style, which is to be expected - but not enough time was given to the viewer to form an early opinion for who to “root” for, also there were not enough explanations for what made each contestant a “student” of the art/craft itself. Both being something the viewer could pick up on and build an association to in order to hook the audience into actually watching the entire season to find out if the contestant they “like” and “picked” actually improves at all in time.
At least the weekly challenges seem entertaining and varied while still related to tattooing. The very first one was all of the contestants had to tattoo a skull onto a pig carcass while inside a meat locker. Next week they each have to pin stripe something onto a car.
I guess I’ll just have to stick this show out and see how it goes…
