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Who Saw This One Coming? - February 28
I fear for the state of game shows today.
I figured the warning shot was when Identity,
NBC's attempt to make a Big Money Game Show out of a
throwaway gag bit on What's My Line?, was crafted
in the image of Deal or No Deal, even though the
two shows are produced by different companies. If that
was the beginning of the end, the end is near with FOX's
newest foray into the kingdom of quiz shows:
Are You Smarter Than a 5th
Grader?
To be brief, the show is Millionaire
but without the multiple choice, without the energy or
excitement. And yet Smarter managed to score over
25 million viewers for the opening episode. A single
contestant chooses from ten topics, each assigned a
grade level from first to fifth, and a subject from a
grade school textbook. A right answer wins money, from
$1,000 to a stonking $500,000. At that point, a
contestant can go double or nothing. The Millionaire
bit kicks in when a contestant is stumped. And oh my,
how they're stumped. Apparently it's good TV to see
people struggling over which country shares the longer
border with the United States, or how many states border
the Pacific Ocean.
I can understand goofing a spelling or a
math question; some people just aren't geared for that
sort of thing. But apparently America wants to see
grown-ups plumb-bobbing questions like whether walruses
live in the Arctic or Antarctic
Oceans, or how many sides a trapezoid had, and they also want to
see a gaggle of fifth graders holding the contestant's
hands in order to win the money. I've had a few
forehead-slapping moments, where I wish I had a V-8, but
I can assure you that the knowledge I gleaned from grade
school has stayed with me. I suspect that much like
Weakest Link, Smarter is looking for
contestants who did the worst on the pre-show screening.
I'll say that again: we now have game shows where
contestants are picked because they cannot answer
the questions correctly.
I'm not sure what's worse: that the show
preys on the "stupidity" of Americans, and that America
is eating it up, or that the game shows zero
originality. Rather than 50:50, Ask the Audience or
Phone-a-Friend, contestants can "copy" the answer of
their selected "classmate," they can "peek" at the
answer of the partner, and keep that or go on their own,
or the contestant can be outright "saved" from a wrong
answer if the partner got it right. We're at the point
where every quiz show has a single contestant playing
against the questions, where every question is worth
more money, and completing the game wins a million
dollars. The production company couldn't even be
bothered to do something original with the "lifeline"
paradigm.
Personally, I would rather the genre
wiped out than seeing more shows like this. If the
producers aren't going to bother to create an
interesting game that is meant to be played by
intelligent and interesting contestants, then I'd rather
do something else with my time. Are You Smarter Than
a 5th Grader is an insult to not only the
contestants, audience and even the host, but a slap in
the face to a genre that has given us so much over the
last sixty years.
But hey, it's FOX. They cancelled Greed. They
majored in Dumbass Programming Decisions at Nielsen
University. You knew this was coming.
Travis Eberle realizes that there's more
to life than game shows, but he's still really ticked
off. Console him at traviseberle@gmail.com, if you dare.
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