The Morning Midway: Let the New Organic Circus Organicate ... TV Reality is Taking Us to World Circus Without Pretense ... Audiences Thrill to What Always Thrills ... .

  With the South Korean flying board splitters

Last night on the first episode of CBS's The World's Greatest, we got glimpses of how little we may know about what is going on around the globe, a la ground-breaking circus or circus-type action.

Maybe I am galloping ahead of my expectations on this one,  but first act -- South Koreans who fly up and split boards in half in midair,  evoked memories of going to a circus in my youth and watching something novel sweep me away.

While organic circuses in the land of PC are brushing away smelly sawdust, purging clowns and animals, and adding "narrative " to tenderize out all traces of undue vulgarity, elsewhere, on other shores,  acrobatic performers and ensembles are proving the grit, glory and exhilaration of how inventive tricks performed with both gusto and perfection can bring down the house.   Special effects and dreary theatrical interludes (big top broccoli) not needed.

Brit TV personality James Cordon is the perfect host. Up there, he is about to try equaling the feat of the South Koreans.  It's a comic gag.

There is so much out there that may never get here.  Where is the John Ringling North of our time who will go into North Korea and sign its quintuple flyers for a First Time in America?  Where is the next bold impresario?  Maybe, okay, he is working for Cirque du Soleil, although I am not so sure anymore. 

All I know is that, here is yet another example how reality TV may be helping to revitalize public interest in circus. And a lot of it has to do with producers and judges obviously not pushing the "new circus" angle.