Metacritic TV

American Inventor

SERIES: ABC, Thursday 9:00p (60 minutes)

Starring Matt Gallant (host)

Created by Simon Cowell, and Peter Jones

Genre(s): Reality (Competitive)

FIRST AIR DATE: March 16, 2006

Overall Metascore

This is a weighted, normalized average of all individual scores given by critics, on a scale of 0 (worst) to 100 (best).

29 / 100

Critic Reviews

75 New York Post Adam Buckman
The audition segments are mostly hilarious.
70 Los Angeles Times Robert Lloyd
I was often moved by the dedication and heart on display.
50 Boston Globe Matthew Gilbert
Despite all its contrived reality melodrama, ''American Inventor" features a steady stream of entertainingly kooky and cool creations.
40 Orlando Sentinel Hal Boedeker
The results suggest that everyone involved looked at American Idol too closely. And this time around, everyone is startlingly off-key.
40 Pittsburgh Post-Gazette Rob Owen
Tonight's premiere is often a huge time-waster, but when it's not boring viewers with the umpteenth meet-the-judges segment and sticks to introducing wacky inventors, it's kind of a hoot.
38 New York Daily News David Hinckley
How un-innovative is this series about innovation? Let me count the ways.
30 Philadelphia Inquirer Jonathan Storm
[Its] intolerable length helps to illuminate the cynicism of these competition shows.
25 Houston Chronicle Mike McDaniel
A bloated disappointment that spends more time on the judges than the inventors and their inventions.
25 Detroit Free Press Mike Duffy
[A] cheesy carnival of reality TV.
20 Variety Brian Lowry
At almost every level, "American Inventor" is over-produced.
10 Seattle Post-Intelligencer Melanie McFarland
The joke goes from bad to grim within minutes.
10 Washington Post Tom Shales
An appalling amalgam of humiliating ridicule, primitive humor and heartbreaking pathos, "American Inventor" flies in on wings of sap.
0 Chicago Sun-Times Doug Elfman
A low-rent "American Idol" ripoff.
0 Chicago Tribune Maureen Ryan
The worst unscripted outing to hit the airwaves in many a moon.
0 Newsday Verne Gay
"American Inventor," ... is unspeakably awful, and makes not just a travesty of the type of television that "American Idol" so dramatically popularized, but an unintentional parody of it as well.

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