Are You Smarter Than... The Lottery?

The Washington Post just covered the sermon I've been singing for days, blasting Fox's new game show "Are You Smarter Than a Fifth Grader" as the ultimate demise of television game shows, as begun by "Millionaire" not so long ago, and supported by that stupid briefcase game.

Paul Fahri asks, "Have TV quiz-show questions become dumber, and have the shows' rules grown wimpier, as producers pander to ever-lower audience expectations and the viewing public's general intellectual flabbiness?"

What. Yes, I watched it. YES, I knew most of the answers...

The thing is, and I think the Washington Post hits on this, the thing IS... historically game shows are about speed as well as intellect. Jeopardy whips through questions like penny candy. "Are you smarter than..." covered four questions in 40 minutes. That's an average of 10 minutes per question! By the time you hit that mark, you are well outside of the "game show" genre and into the "reality television" genre.

In the reality television game show, we don't really care if he knows the answer. Those type of questions don't require skill; at a certain point, they just require luck. It's like the lotto. Sure, we want him to win. But we're more interested in watching him writhe around trying to figure out what to do than finding out the answer to the question. (Does anyone ever remember the winning lotto ticket number? Nope, but we might remember who won.)

On the other hand, I'll occasionally remark to a friend, "Hey I heard this question on Jeopardy and I thought of you..." but I certainly wouldn't remember who was playing at the time. The reason I would think of one specific person would be due to the specificity of the question: a question about Les Mis, and my friend Heather who loves the story, for example. Reality television game shows would not generally showcase questions to that degree of detail, because there'd be no "oh oooooh oh it's on the tip of my tongue..." suspense involved.

It's interesting, right?
I mean, I'll take Jeopardy, but it's interesting.