Opinion: Killer Whales launched season 2 but no one noticed
Last year, Hello Labs and CoinMarketCap embarked on a new calling: reality television. Protos reviewed the first season of Killer Whales, and while we were largely unimpressed, it’s hard to imagine we would miss out on watching every episode of the second season.
When Killer Whales premiered in May on Google Play and Apple TV, few, if any, media outlets were made aware.
Fortunately, while anyone keen on watching can now see episodes one through four for free on YouTube, Protos has once again decided to wade through the entire series pre-full, free public release so you don’t have to.
Read more: Opinion: Killer Whales misses
Lazy series but at least nothing important happens
It’s hard to describe just how little happened over the course of five episodes.
I can, however, tell you about a handful of strange, pointless decisions that the production teams made.
For instance, the first episode features a co-hosting duo: the annoying and personality-less ThreadGuy and the Andrew Tate fart-sniffing Aiden Ross.
Ross’s time is cut short, and after the first few minutes of episode one, he never appears again.
But why feature a Trump-loving, Dubai-residing, degenerate loser for three minutes of a five episode series? That’s left for you to decide.
The rest of the show is a never ending parade of unlovable deadbeat judges, from no-name crypto exchange execs to crypto influencers with more bot followers than real people.
You can be assured it’s a particularly awful group of judges when the highest profile among them is former Trump appointee Anthony Scaramucci, who, along with the equally irritating Mario Nawfal, seems to get the most screen time.
The set is cheap, the writing is bland and corny, and the ability to differentiate one stupid project from another is impossible.
Shark Tank, but we don’t want to get sued
The creators of Killer Whales would have you believe this show is similar to Shark Tank — not exactly high brow TV viewing, but a fun, undemanding watch — but that’s not the case.
It’s hard to describe any of the sharks on Shark Tank as likeable, but it’s fair to say they’re putting something on the line for the projects they support, albeit minimally: money, time, and energy.
However, it’s unclear to me, even after hours of time spent watching this atrocity, what any project actually wins. They mention the fact that the show is “giving away $1.5 million in prizes,” including “an accelerator program from the legendary CoinMarketCap.”
Exactly what this CoinMarketCap accelerator program is and how it’s valued is left for you to decide.
No other prizes were ever mentioned, but even if every project that got a yes from the judges was to receive any equal cut of an all-cash prize pool, it would amount to little more than a couple hundred thousands dollars.
This is pennies in the tip jar for these projects, many of which have already raised millions in venture capital.
By taking away stakes for judges and not bothering to mention what any of these projects are playing for, Killer Whales has seemingly already failed the first rule of storytelling: have a beginning, middle, and end.
Highlights (don’t worry, it’s only a few)
If you haven’t watched YouTuber Atrioc streaming the first episode, it’s very funny (particularly when a project suggests it will usher in the future with 3D NFTs).
The first episode also features a bagholder in a cybertruck shilling a memecoin (this “project” somehow gets funded), while in episode three, the gang accidentally funds a sniping bot on Solana.
In the season finale (not yet available for free on YouTube), TransHuman Coin — one of the few projects that’s seen an increase in its token value since the show was released in May — described itself like so:
“Our mission at Transhuman Coin is to push the capabilities of humanity, so we don’t accept death and disease as given. TransHuman Coin is the official token of the TransHuman Movement.”
It’s clear that there isn’t much of an audience for this watered down, cryptofied version of Shark Tank: views for episode one of season two were nearly 25,000, yet views for episode four only number in the hundreds.
How did the whales fare?
Below is a list of featured projects where public data shows whether they have gone up or down in value since the release of the show in May:
- Karate Combat: down 52%
- Brett on Based: down 60%
- WAGMI Games: down 93%
- Elixir Games: down 72%
- Bitscrunch: down 56%
- Galileo Protocol: down 37%
- Carv: down 56%
- Paw: down 60%
- Birb: up 6.7%
- TransHuman Coin: up 15%
The only two projects that are up since May weren’t funded by the whales.
Dumb, bad concept, significantly dumber and worse show
There’s no problem with the concept of Killer Whales just because it revolves around cryptocurrency, rather the fact that most of the projects featured aren’t businesses or ventures but almost exclusively memecoins and bizarre rugpulls.
The unfortunate reality for is that it’s a poorly thought out and boring show.
No one knows what anybody receives for winning, the rules aren’t fully explained, and there’s no build up over the course of five episodes.
It feels as though the creators just took the worst parts of Shark Tank and the most mundane garbage from The Apprentice and combined them to make a simply terrible reality television show that no one with a functional brain would take the time to watch.
But hey, that’s why I’m here.
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