Greatest American Dog

If you are a dog person, have I got a show for you. It's like dog camp but done as a reality show, Greatest American Dog.

As a reality-show virtue, good manners are refreshing, if--like Dog--rather unexciting. [1 Aug 2008, p.47]

The dog-and-owner interplay ranges from the awesome and comic to the cringe-worthy.

This series turns out to be far less than the sum of its parts, with the human egos far surpassing the stupid pet tricks in terms of relevance and screen time. And that’s wholly unfortunate.

The main problem here is that the show's producers aren't sure what the dogs and the people should really do together, so they have them put on dorky little skits that even dog people can't appreciate, or they make them participate in obedience challenges like "jump over this" or "sit here very quickly," which many dog lovers would regard with the disdain reserved for toddlers who blurt out random phrases in French.

This series could still do some reasonable ratings by summer standards, though those viewers that do sit will have very little reason to stay; still, the shame is that the producers took what could have been an amusing lark and initially sucked most of the life out of it by following the same-old unscripted-competition script so closely.