franktangredi wrote:
What happened last night was simple. The woman has extreme math anxiety. She saw numbers and her brain shut down. She immediately assumed she couldn't answer it and didn't bother trying. She made a fool of herself, and she knew it....
Despite having had to sit through the entire debacle... in an attempt to be fair to her, although I completely agree with what Frank said here, I think there was even more to it.
I would guess it wasn't Heaton's idea to do the show, especially given her obvious unfamiliarity with the game. More likely it was some ABC promo monkey that got the brilliant notion to fly her
all the way across the country to make [what should have been] a
five minute appearance, merely for what boiled down to an advertisment for her new fall show.
Thus she was clearly very nervous and afraid of making a fool of herself, as Frank said, before she ever even walked out. Then she got what the question writers probably figured was a total softball (I know my first thought was, "Rachael Ray got that nasty Google question... and she gets THIS? Geez."). But instead it was her worst nightmare. And she panicked, big time.
Now factor in an audience that had already been at the studio for nearly five hours, including a prior celebrity segment (albeit not a terrible one). I'd also wager, given 90-plus former contestants in attendance, that this group was likely to be more anti-celebrity than the "average" studio audience.
So we probably weren't terribly inclined to be on her "side" from the start, and her goofy interview with Reege didn't help. When she saw the question, and panicked so quickly and badly... she'd lost us, and she knew it. (Any performer that's worked with live audiences as much as Heaton knows immediately when a crowd is with her... and when it isn't.) And once the panic set in, everything she did or said just buried her that much further. It was like the perfect storm -- all the elements seeming to conspire against her.
That said, it was still a nightmare to endure in person. Those things are relatively easy to understand in retrospect; not so much at the time. And thank god Regis talked her through to the answer as he did, or we might STILL be sitting there.