Clichés, Anderson Cooper's Absence Sabotage The Mole

Host Jon Kelly describes the cliché-ridden competition “When Pigs Fly,” on the second episode of ABC’s fifth season of The Mole, by saying that “the players must use the slingshot to launch the pigs into the arena.” Sound enthralling?

The concept of The Mole is that the players must compete in a diverse set of challenges to win money for a collective pot that only one of them ultimately wins. The catch? One of the players is a mole⎯a double agent hired by ABC to sabotage the group’s efforts and keep the total group earnings to a minimum. The goal? To work individually to figure out the identity of the mole. Each contestant’s knowledge is tested with a quiz⎯every question of which is about the mole. Each week, the player who scores the lowest on the quiz is eliminated.

In the “When Pigs Fly” challenge, players were required to break up into teams of three to retrieve specific ceramic pigs from stores in one town in Chile, the locale this season, and then launch them one by one into an arena in which two players were waiting to catch the pigs in⎯how clever⎯a blanket, adding $1,000 to the bank for each pig caught. As for a time constraint, they had to complete this mission all before a renowned Chilean ceramicist and her son crafted 12 ceramic piggy banks identical to those being fetched and flung by the contestants. Sign me up!

A fan since the first season, I suffered through the celebrity editions in the hopes that one day ABC would launch another round of competition among less high-profile contestants. I was enamored of the simple yet genuinely thrilling and spontaneous challenges the players participated in during the first two seasons.

The first two episodes of the current season featured convoluted, studio-game-show, watered-down versions of what The Mole challenges used to be. In comparing the first challenges of the first episodes of seasons one and five respectively, the flaws of this season become glaringly obvious. In season one, players were told that if they all successfully skydived out of a plane in tandem with an instructor, a large sum of money would be added to the group pot. For this season’s first challenge, players were asked to vote on who they thought the mole was⎯and this person got some special privileges during the challenge. Then there was a waterfall, jumping off rafts, and grabbing bags of money. But some bags were filled with fake money. Tricky, right? This challenge, like seemingly all of the others this season, was designed in the hopes of being multidimensional and daring, but frankly, it was contrived and tacky.

Besides the radical downgrade in thrill-level of the challenges, new host Jon Kelley is less than stimulating. What was it about Anderson Cooper that added such pizzazz and sophistication to the first two seasons? His unique voice and serious delivery of lines added a dark and rugged flare to the show’s espionage concept. But alas, the show has now lost the compelling, espionage-ridden, reverse-psychology conviction it possessed during at least the first two seasons. Kelley’s cheekbones may be as chiseled as Cooper’s, but the best bone structure in the world could not compensate for the show’s newfound conceptual deficiency.

Maybe this was one show better left in the past, fondly reminisced about, rather than revived for another season.

The Mole airs Mondays at 10 on ABC. The first two episodes can be seen on abc.com.