After Akeelah and the Bee and Spellbound, not to mention that movie Bee Season which no one saw and may or may not have involved the actual national spelling bee, you may wonder, what interest is there left in the Scripps National Spelling Bee?
Well, apparently, plenty. ABC, for the second year in a row, will be airing the final two hours of the bee tomorrow night, from 8 p.m. to 10 p.m. For those of us who have actually seen the movies listed above (OK, fine, Akeelah was fiction but it felt real!), we know there is plenty of real, live television drama to be found. It seems somehow cruel that the spelling bee would be open only to kids in the most awkward period of their lives-- sixth, seventh and eighth-graders only are eligible, with a maximum age of 16-- but in television terms, it’s brilliant. Kids can have a mixture of petrified horror and witty candor, as with one kid the LA Times wrote about this morning: "His first reaction on hearing the word was to burst out laughing. The crowd in the 1,100-seat ballroom burst out laughing too. Every time the judge offered the word, the 11-year-old burst out laughing. With the clock running (contestants get two minutes and 30 seconds to spell the word from the time they hear it), he had to stop the giggles to spell the word. When he did so correctly, the crowd burst into applause.”
Watch for even more antics tomorrow night, as the stakes get higher. The LA Times also profiles Kunal Sah from Utah, who aims to “make it to the top” in order to help his parents, who were recently deported to India. Plus someone might faint onstage, as Akshay Buddiga did in 2004.
The winner of tomorrow’s final round will win $35,000 in cash, a $5,000 scholarship, various savings bonds and reference books, which I guess are still useful in this age of Wikipedia. And if they’re lucky, like eventual winner Nupur Lala in Spellbound, the press will be announcing “Winner’s-name-here-mania!” come Friday. Hey, it sure beats reruns.
