THE PROTAGONIST

I finally started the daunting task of writing a draft of my first chapter for my PhD and ended up writing quite a bit about John Kilduff’s Let’s Paint TV which will no doubt be scrapped eventually. Embrace failare buddy! 

The initial inspiration for The O Show was John Kilduff's Let's Paint TV which ran from 2002 to 2008 as a public access show in Los Angeles and ended up as a daily spot on stickam.com, a website that enables interactive broadcasting via webcam and chat rooms. Kilduff’s show entails him running on a treadmill, blending mixed drinks, painting canvases and answering calls from random members of the public; all performed in front of a blue screen which shows alternative angles, such as close-ups of what he’s painting or cooking, adding another level of visual chaos. It looks sort of like something you would expect to find on US daytime television – a combination of Bob Ross and exercise infomercial, but on acid. 
 

 The early episodes were very much about testing John’s multitasking abilities or lack thereof, seeing how many activities he could do (or not) simultaneously, adding things like interviewing special guests and playing chess on top of his usual mix of activities. Each episode played with form and content; for example, one episode shows John playing table tennis with the invisible man (a man draped in fabric so that blue screen special effects could wipe away all but his sun-glasses and ping pong paddle). Kilduff’s experimentation with materials/technology and his gift for delivering an amusing, at times absurd, at times profound, oratory play-by-play fuelled the series and earned him a place in both LA counter-culture and UCLA’s highly competitive Masters in Fine Art programme. With the advent of the internet, his videos went viral and gained an international audience; some of his youtube clips have had more than a million views. The more recent stickam episodes which are filmed at his home in The Valley, have a much more DIY aesthetic and are geared towards interacting with his dispersed but committed, web-based community of fans who chat in the stickam chat room.

Day after day, episode after episode, Kilduff espouses the benefits of creativity, perseverance and “embracing failare” [sic], but Let’s Paint TV viewers are divided about whether or not his preaching is ironic or heartfelt. I would argue that it’s the mixture of both that allows their identification and keeps them coming back for more. Critic Doug Harvey describes it aptly: “[b]oisterous, irreverent and surreal, Let’s Paint TV is nevertheless utterly sincere in its espousal of painting as a path of creative liberation’, although I might substitute the word ‘painting’ for ‘multitasking’ or maybe even ‘play’.

Let's Paint TV can be analysed as an example of post-modern parody, especially the cable-access episodes; using absurdity and irony, Kilduff critiques the values of perfectionism and consumerism espoused within US daytime TV programming. On one level, Let’s Paint TV repeats the conventions of the infomercial with the critical difference being that the balding, out-of-breath Kilduff replaces the coherent, attractive and aspirational figure of the salesperson. John is the ultimate ‘everyman’, someone who viewers identify with perhaps more readily and intimately than they would the sun-tanned, muscle-toned body trying to sell them the latest exercise gadget. On another level, the show places itself at the end of a lineage of hobbyist, how-to painting shows, with the critical difference between John Kilduff and Bob Ross being that Ross demonstrates a certain level of skill that can be copied, a fact made all the more poignant because the main message of Let’s Paint TV is to be yourself.[1]