What has happened to TV game shows?
The Price is Right, Press Your Luck, Concentration, Card Sharks, Tic Tac Dough; there was a time when contestants had to rub some brain cells to find a right answer and earn the cheap-ass stemware (the show’s talking head claims is crystal ... maybe someone named Crystal made it) that I'm sure cracks the minute you fill it with some vintage Boon’s Farm.
Monday night saw Wife and I pulling up a hunk of couch for an episode of Deal or No Deal, and I could feel my seven remaining brain cells actually gasp for some sort of intelligent stimulation. Our minds would have been better off watching two monkeys humping a football. At least chimps attempting sexual intercourse with an inflatable object involves some sort of strategy.
Deal or No Deal’s strategy is whether to choose case No. 13 or No. 69 after selecting No. 24.
If you haven’t watched this television brilliancy, here’s how the game works: Some schmuck (the contestant - but when your sole job is to choose numbers, are you really a contestant?) enters the stage, which looks like it was a rejected set piece of a star destroyer for Star Wars, and twists up their face into a giant "O" look and eye fucks the crowd. Then, the schmuck greets Howie Mandel and his egg-shaped dome; never has a host fit a show so concretely. Mandel’s act in the '80s involved him blowing up rubber surgical gloves and squeezing his egg-shaped melon into the glove, all in the name laughs (because nothing says funny like a dude wearing a surgical glove on his head – of course, if he mixed in jokes about poo and midget porn, well we all know that’s comic gold). Given the choice between the two, the game show or Howie's act, I’d slit my wrists and wish crows would eat my testicles. But that’s just me.
Back to the “game,” a gaggle of hookers - fresh from the pole at Cheetahs - come strutting onto a raised dais, each holding a silver case, the kind of case that reminds me of what Bond villains typically pack their doomsday instrument in, which would liven this show up. If there's a chance of death, I'm your target audience. Each case has a number and the schmuck chooses one, hoping that particular case will make his/her dream come true, or at the very least wipe away the mountain of debt he/she . Mandel then places the case on the table for all the world to see (or at least the half dozen loyal viewers in West Virginia). The case can contain a million bucks or a penny or somewhere in between, and since Howie is a butt munch of the royal supreme order, we have to wait before that amount is revealed. Oh boy, can you taste the tension?
With me so far? I know it’s a lot to swallow, but hang in there.
Once the “Who Wants to be a Millionaire” reject (picking numbers – like boogers - is so much easier than calling your friends to answer questions for you) chooses their case they must now select the numbered cases that the hookers are feeling up on stage. They choose five or six in the first round, whereupon the hooker performs a strip tease dance and reveals what amount the schmuck just pissed away. If it’s a chunk of change, the hooker cackles at the dumbshit’s misfortune for selecting the wrong number. Oh wait, that's me. She puts on a pouty face, the same face she probably uses when a John doesn't tip her a few extra bucks for the table dance, and says, sorry buckaroo you can kiss this $100,000 good bye.
After five or so cases a phone rings and Howie gets his panties in bunch. “It’s the banker,” he says, and I imagine Bill Gates in his lair that is decked out chrome and bean bags petting a hairless cat. The banker’s sole job is to mind fuck the schmuck selecting numbers. We don’t hear the banker’s voice, but I like to think he sounds like a cross between Mike Tyson and Carol Channing.
“He’ll give $3,000 and a BJ from every model for that case,” Mandel says, and now the schmuck must decide whether to take the offer or continue selecting numbers.
Understand? That’s the “game.” Selecting numbers. There are no questions to answers. No puzzles to solve. No whammies to avoid. Just pick a number, any number, and that’s it.
My handy-dandy dictionary defines “game” for me: “a competitive activity involving skill, chance, or endurance on the part of two or more persons who play according to a set of rules, usually for their own amusement or for that of spectators.”
Let’s see if Deal or No Deal matches this definition: competitive activity? One person picking numbers - unless the hookers hurled the metal cases at the contestant who must avoid the throws like he/she was a rubber ducky at a shooting gallery, there really is no competition here. Skill – if a gorilla can do the same thing as a human in a “game” then it’s no game in my book, and I saw Koko the Gorilla sign, "Get me some food, you ass clown," when she was alive. Chance – OK, you have me there, they are taking a chance at picking cases that don’t have a million bucks inside. Endurance – if you count having to endure an hour of Howie Mandel on TV, well then, sure, it’s a god damn game.
Summer vacation mornings were prime game show viewing time for Lil' Sis and I. Starting with Wheel of Fortune (young Vanna White gave me a chubby the size of a baby grand piano), then Sale of the Century before Press Your Luck came along, Price is Right (the grand poobah of game shows), Concentration and finally Card Sharks before Scrabble came along, and I would have won all of them if I could get on, and wasn't 9 years old. Damn those age restrictions.
Those were game shows, though. There were questions to answer, prices to guess, puzzles to solve.
The fact is we're not too far from putting a game show on the tube that involves one person playing solitaire. It's no monkeys humping a football, but as along as Howie ain't the host I'll probably tune in.
No comments:
Post a Comment