Glad I found this thread. I can talk about someone who had a meteoric rise in Argentine television, and is currently tumbling down. Marcelo Tinelli, born on April 1, 1960. He was the host of the variety comedy program Videomatch (1990-2004), later known as Showmatch (2005 and onwards, it's currently on one of its sabbatical years).
Here's a "before" and "after" comparison:
Yes, those pictures are of the
same person. Left looks like it's from the early 2000s, right is from his latest flop of a TV project, "Primos de America" (Cousins of America, because Tinelli brought his cousin "Tirri" along to be a co-host) - it failed so badly that barely anyone saw it even though he got an interview with World Cup winner, Lionel Messi. In fact, the picture on the right is from that very same interview. The only reason I became aware of this was because an anon on 4chan recently brought up this show's failure. What went wrong? (Keep in mind, this is just one of his numerous failures in recent years - his peak popularity was mainly due to being surrounded by popular comedians, and having literally no competition on TV)
Translating data from some articles here:
The show failed because it was meant to be about the 2024 Copa America tournament (hosted in the US) where Argentina's national soccer team played, and eventually, won the tournament. One big problem was that they weren't able to get permission to
cover the tournament, or nearly anything related to it. This includes the national team, which was a huge problem. The program was thus, completely doomed, because Tinelli had to cover half of a one hour timeslot via wandering around the streets of the US, trying to be funny and failing.
Imagine if a boring Youtube vlog somehow made it on TV. That's what the show was. It flopped in a way that exposed Tinelli as being boring as shit when he doesn't have actual comedians around. Other than the Messi interview, the "highlights" of the show were Tinelli's cousin eating, and a random black american from the street that probably should have been edited off the show. The entire program is here:
The black guy comes in at around 2:00
Its ratings were so bad that it was cancelled after just one show, even though there were plans to have two episodes of this per week.
He also got involved with a big Argentine football club, San Lorenzo. In 2019,
he won the election to become the team's president, with huge support (he was vice-president in years prior, and was a known fan of the team long before that). The team's finances went to shit, partially due to COVID, and partially because Tinelli liked to use bouncy checks. San Lorenzo's finances got so bad that their stadium stopped being maintained during 2020-21, and a picture of a withered dog's carcass in the stadium went viral. I will not post it here because it's gross. The point is that the team decayed on and off the field so badly, that Tinelli
took a leave of absence in may 2021, and
finally resigned from the job on april 2022. The presidency was supposed to last until 2023. Around may 2021, there was a
report of the team losing up to 100 thousand dollars per month - the finances were Fucked. To this day, they're still not good, even with newer leadership, the club's players were having issues getting paid this month.
His noteworthy social media presence, as far as I can tell, is on instagram
Dude is clearly washed up, hanging on to his past success for dear life, but hey, at least he got rid of the pink hair soon enough. He looked really bad with it.