Taming of the rock beast

Rockstar INXS hosts Dave Navarro and Brooke Burke.

What do you get when you take one of the most anti-establishment art forms and mix it with mainstream, reality-talent-quest TV? A caged beast called Rockstar INXS (TV3, 8.30pm).

The show looks wild, the wannabe rock stars strut, roar and shake their manes, the strain they put on the hips and crotch makes your eyes water, but the search for a new member to front the veteran Aussie rock band is a tamed, circus animal in essence.

Some might say the band have bucked convention, spurning the usual excruciating audition process and getting straight down to business with the 15 finalists they came up with after an international talent search. This means the wannabes already have some ability and some are seasoned performers, but skipping the try-outs has deprived viewers of one of the chief features of the genre: the ritual humiliation of the hopelessly deluded.

What does it offer instead? This is a hardcore show, so the desperation to be famous and the conviction that winning the show will be a dream come true is that much more intense. In last week's opening instalment the aspirants introduced themselves with such fatalistic declarations as, "I don't have a choice, I have to be a rock star".

Rockstar INXS certainly makes its Pop Idol forebear look and sound pallid in comparison. The price you have to pay for the added energy and volume is endless sameness. Yes, if you got a dollar for every time host Brooke Burke - a 100 per cent plastic Rockchick Barbie - says the word "rockin" or someone gives the goat sign (no one on this show deserves that privilege, says an outraged Herald music critic), you'd be rollin' in it.

For all the noise and energy, the show is inescapably a highly artificial affair. The contenders strut their stuff in short, rock-karaoke outbursts: the hand-picked audience gives even the lamest efforts an ecstatic reception.

The judging, by INXS members and celebrity adviser Dave Navarro is, well, nice. Even when they're disappointed by the performances, the judges are polite. They angst endlessly about how difficult it is to send someone home, as if they didn't choose to fill the band's vacancy with an elimination-style telly format but had it thrust upon them.

Navarro displays a bit of rockstar style in his warm appreciation of the female performers. Otherwise he comes across as a caricature, although the weird topiary of his facial hair is one of the show's more interesting features.

While the finalists' onstage performances are Olympic-level displays of raspiness, mic stand throwing, banshee howling and pelvic thrusting, the off-stage antics are pure mainstream reality TV.

We've had the standard bonding over bubbly in the hot tub, the weepy revelations. So far, sex, drugs and trashing the Hollywood Hills mansion the group are holed up in doesn't look like being on the agenda. This is a job interview after all: the prize an executive position with a famous international brand.

Hanging over the show is the suicide of former leading man Michael Hutchence. Perhaps it's that, as well as seeing rock in thrall to the latest trend in commercial TV, that makes Rockstar INXS kind of sad.

But it's not surprising. After seeing the Prince of Darkness bamboozled by his TV remote and being walked all over by his pets and kids in the hit reality show The Osbournes, the taming of the rock beast was inevitable: watch Rockstar INXS and hear it howlin'.