© 2002 Brian Hodges - Please do not remove the copyright from this essay

haven’t enjoyed The Price is Right since I was old enough to have a job during the daytime. I indulged the Who Wants to Be a Millionaire craze for about a week. I avoided all but one season (the second) of Survivor. You know that feeling you get during Wheel of Fortune (which my in-laws have appropriately dubbed "the idiot show") when the first two letters of a three-letter word are "TH" and the guy with his name on his shirt drops a couple hundred bucks to buy an "E"? I start yelling obscenities and wishing the TV sound went both ways.

I guess you could say I’ve never been "on-board" with the whole game show thing. I tried, but my feeling is that if somebody is going to be given a great deal of money for "knowing stuff", that person should be at least as smart as me. Trust me, that’s not asking a whole lot. I even tried watching the first Battle of the Child Geniuses thinking I’d finally see some good competition – but ended up turning it off after the third ten-year-old with a scholarship to M.I.T. and a supposed IQ of 300 didn’t know the square root of nine.

The only game show I have ever been able to completely justify is Jeopardy, which ironically is the show that most game show lovers hate since it tends to point out their own intellectual inferiority. There is no other game on television where the contestants actually have to be smart. They can’t just make an educated guess on multiple choice questions. They can’t ask their friends for help. And they can’t spend five minutes trying to figure out the answer. How often does a contestant bow out before the $500 question on Millionaire and somebody punts the lame rationale of: "Well I guess it’s harder when you’re under pressure." Anybody with that mentality gets annihilated on Jeopardy. If you can’t handle the pressure, there are two other guys who can.

So I guess, in a way Jeopardy is a metaphor for success in life: "Know your shit. Be better than the competition. And don’t choke under the pressure." Well maybe that was the metaphor for success at one point in time. The recent wave of game shows certainly doesn’t really reflect that ideology.

Survivor was originally intended to be a physical, mental and strategic challenge in which the weakest members of a tribe were voted off by the strongest. Instead, alliances were formed to eliminate any player strong enough to be a threat. As a result, the incompetent players always made it into the final rounds. In all fairness, by the end of each season, most everybody said that the last survivor did in fact deserve to win. Maybe so, but they definitely assured their victory by keeping company with the low ends of the totem pole.

So maybe our metaphor for success should be: "Know your shit, but surround yourself with incompetence so that it’s blatantly obvious that you are in fact better than the competition. Still, don’t crack under the pressure"

In the Survivor / Millionaire hybrid, The Weakest Link, the metaphor deteriorates even further. In this particular game, a team of contestants builds up a bank of money by answering rapid-fire questions. At the end of each round, they vote out one player whom the host Anne Robinson shines on with her trademark, "You are the weakest link! G-bye." The last two players face off question for question and whoever answers the most correctly wins the bank. Obviously it’s in the winner’s best interest to keep the smartest players around and ensure that more money is being banked. But then again, isn’t it better to assure your own victory by keeping the dumb ones around? After all, half-o-somethin’ is better than twice-o-nothin’ right? Inevitably, the smartest people are always voted out. Although, to be fair, if somebody is a total and complete idiot, they too are eliminated. What you end up with are two players at the peak of mediocrity sparring for far less money than they could have won.

Apparently the formula for success should now read: "Know some shit. But don’t let on that you know too much. Identify your competition and eliminate them, thus eliminating the pressure."

My waning faith in game shows was briefly restored by The Mole in which a team of players earns money for a group pot through a series of challenges. Among the group was a "mole" whose job was to sabotage as many challenges as possible, reducing the amount of money earned. Each episode, the players were quizzed about the mole’s identity. Whoever got the most questions wrong was eliminated. The last player standing won the pot. I loved this concept because it was the first game show since the reality-TV explosion where victory was determined by merit and not by the insecurities of lesser players. At least, I thought so until they revealed the winner; a guy named Steve who had managed to single-handedly screw up just about every challenge he was a part of – thus making everybody else think he was the mole.

Well, in addition to finally killing the whole appeal of game shows for me, The Mole ushered in one final metaphor for the decline of modern civilization: "Have shit for brains and let the competition worry about the pressure. Then when he cracks under it, step in and claim victory for yourself."

It’s been almost three years since Who Wants to Be a Millionaire came onto the scene, spawning several dozen bandwagon clones. With any luck, the decline in reality-TV will continue and game shows will once again be ousted from primetime. Until then, we’re stuck watching highschool dropouts win hundreds of thousands of dollars to great fanfare, simply for knowing a few trivial facts. Meanwhile, the true geniuses over on Jeopardy continue to earn their respectable prize of ten or twenty thousand dollars without so much as a crescendo in the theme music. But hey, isn’t that how success works these days anyway?