The following was
originally typed December 30, 2012, and it was expanded upon January 7 and 16,
2013. It is posted here without being finished or anything like that.
Are Survivor and The Amazing Race
to be counted on lists of “game shows?” They’re not quite presented with all
the trappings of what most perceive as game shows, and they’re long-term,
intense competitions. The term “reality show” can cover a broad range of
programming, from competitions to documentaries, but many have some
manipulation from the writers to make sure the people are acting to some
extent.
If a game show is something with
a pure competition among contestants that isn’t messed with in any way (except
in what’s covered by “this program was edited for broadcast”), then should we
strike such rigged ‘50s quiz shows as Twenty-One
from the “game show” category and put them down as something akin to pro
wrestling, but with moves that involve more words and fewer physical grapples?
What about Love Connection? Some call it a game show, but how do we know it is
or isn’t? What about The Hollywood
Squares and Match Game? How much
of a game should it be to meet the requirements? How much skill should it take?
What about What’s My Line? How much
input from a contestant does there have to be? What about American Gladiators? How much of the presentation we associate with
game shows do we need?
Forget for a moment everything
you know about game shows, including the sense that you know one when you see
one.
Now let’s look at Jeopardy! There’s obviously a game going
on there, isn’t there? Three contestants are given a test of how much each one
knows about various topics, with the ability to quickly think of the correct
response to each clue playing its part in deciding which one gets the money.
This is definitely a quiz show, and it’s a deep one, with the jeopardy of
losing money by answering incorrectly, the strategy in figuring out what to
wager on a Daily Double, and – especially now that only the winner gets all of
the money – the strategy for Final Jeopardy! Anyone who says this isn’t a game
show is crazy.
Here’s another quiz show, Twenty-One. Two players take turns
selecting a point value for a category, each one not knowing what the other has
done. Does a player end the game thinking the other player has fewer or keep it
going the full length? Does the winner, if there is one, face another
contestant and risk it all or walk away with the money earned? And if there’s a
tie, the two play again, and the payoff to the winner increases. It sure sounds
exciting. If the right kinds of people are playing, that is. And the production
company made sure that was the case. It was planned out like a professional
wrestling match of the mind, with “faces” like Charles Van Doren and “heels”
like Herbert Stempel. But until word got out and Congress subsequently
investigated the industry, people believed it and other quiz shows were real
game shows as much as they thought pro wrestling was a real sporting competition.
Let’s switch gears and look at Family Feud. The core of the game is
being able to guess what a bunch of people said to a certain survey. Members of
each family go to the podium to see which family gets the choice to continue
guessing or pass the question to the other one (though some formats made it so
the family that won the faceoff just played the question). There’s no real quiz
involved, so they’re free to get appealing families for the show. Occasionally,
a contestant will give strange answers, showing the foibles some people may
have. It’s good, casual fun, but each family really wants to score enough for
the chance to play for the big money.
Of course, the version of the
show that’s been in syndication since ’99 plays for points in the front game,
not dollars. That’s because the game can be edited for broadcast; they have a
certain amount of time in which to play that is restricted more. Early on, they
had a fourth round worth triple the points, but soon they changed it so the
first to 300 won. The latter change makes it more likely that the program be
edited so one family doesn’t get to 300 in three rounds. The point of the
editing is that the outcome of the game isn’t changed. That’s part of what
makes the current Feud look fake, but
at least they’re not planning every single move.
Now let’s look at the ‘70s
version of Match Game. The focus here
is obviously not as much on the game as it is on the celebrities. The
contestants might want to have half a brain if they want a chance to play in
the bonus round, but sometimes the funny stories have only one general way to
fill in the blank. As was the case with other Goodson-Todman panel shows, much
of the appeal lay with the emcee and panelists. This one also had as one of its
chief points the kind of humor on which TV tried to keep the lid as tight as
possible, the kind that would be present in a few sitcoms of the period. The
bonus round was a basic enough task as well, but it fit in well with the light
format.
There’s no denying that Family Feud and Match Game were game shows because each one involved competing civilian
contestants, but What’s My Line is on
the flip side. When panelists try to guess what the civilian does for a
living, it’s a game for them, but the civilian and emcee try not to lead them
in the wrong direction. That holds true for mystery challengers as well, even
though the celebrity may answer in an altered voice or without words.
Expansions and alterations of the format appeared on other shows, but this one
is considered the epitome because of the prestige of the panel, the
distinguished mystery guests, and the fact that it started in 1950.
One show along the lines of What’s My Line that adds a bit of a game-like
element on the other side is To Tell the
Truth. One story about a person is told, and along with that person are two
imposters trying to deceive the panel, all of whom ask their choice of
contestants for further details that may help in revealing which one is
actually the person around whom the story revolves.
Speaking of having to choose
among three, the The Dating Game,
where the bachelorette is given some questions to ask of bachelors and chooses
one after all that questioning, is certainly more of a game show than Love Connection. The latter is more
about recounting the date itself, and picking one of the three happens before
the show. But the studio audience, after seeing the same tapes the guest saw,
votes for one of the three with whom the production company can pay for
another date. What makes it a game show in so many people’s minds, though,
instead of another daytime TV show? Is it Chuck Woolery? Is it the
presentation? Is it the real and/or perceived differences from shows where the
idea is to bring on the most pathetic of people and for the studio and TV
audience to mock them? While we’re at it, does America’s Funniest Home Videos qualify as a game show because of
the prizes involved?
If competition is something that
defines the boundaries of a game show, then where does that put quiz shows
where only one person is competing, like Who
Wants to Be a Millionaire? Those are game shows as well, because quiz shows
are a subset of game shows, aren’t they? Although quiz shows with one
contestant against the questions alone date back at least to the days of radio (including
Take it or Leave It, whose TV
successor was The $64,000 Question),
we’ve cast doubt on classifying any big-money quiz shows from the ‘50s as game
shows. In the minds of game-show fans, though, they count just the same.
Millionaire goes up a money ladder with questions getting more
difficult as the money at stake grows, similar to The $64,000 Question, but a law passed 39 years before its US debut
prohibits fixing. Come to think of it, the process of getting on the network
version started with quizzes by phone and culminated in a competition among
ten possible contestants at the studio, where the one who could place four
items in the correct order the fastest qualified for the chance to win the big
money, so there was some competition with others that was seen on TV. These
days, the syndicated Millionaire has
adjusted its format to some extent, but it hasn’t come anywhere near the
excitement that spawned so many big-money game shows in the first few years of
the 2000s.
Such giveaways happen on Survivor, but only some people think of
it as a game show. A bunch of people spend an extended period of time competing
on a show that has a finite amount of episodes shown on a weekly basis, and the
winner gets a million dollars. Others don’t think of it as a game show, but a
now-defunct game show Web site calls the slew of long-term competitions it
spawned “game operas.” It might have a few elements in common with
non-competitive reality shows that are more like documentaries (e.g. Pawn Stars), especially if it’s people
who wouldn’t usually be together doing things they wouldn’t otherwise do (e.g. The Real World), but the fact that competition
is the driving element makes Survivor
a kind of game show to some, albeit an unconventional one, while purists put it
in a different category.
Not every game show is played
from a podium and/or sitting down. Beat
the Clock challenges people to do physical stunts in a set amount of time.
The Nickelodeon version of Double Dare
(not to be confused with an unrelated Goodson-Todman show of the same name) has
such stunts involved as an alternative to answering questions from a podium,
and an obstacle course is the endgame. Truth
or Consequences is even less about answering questions than Double Dare, and it was a pioneer of the
format, having made its radio debut in 1940. Minute to Win It has all the big-money trappings Millionaire codified applied to
challenges, but unlike Beat the Clock,
contestants usually practice these challenges at home. All of these count as
game shows for sure, with contestants who strike the audience as everyday
people and a format that’s all in good fun, except in the case of the
high-stakes Minute to Win It.
But for every hundred John and
Jane Does running with shopping carts on Supermarket
Sweep, there’s an excellent athlete who can hold his or her own with the
physical specimens on American Gladiators.
Other game shows have tournaments with varying degrees of regularity, but here,
the larger competition was a
tournament among only a few who had passed auditions, like most reality
competitions today. Though it could be considered sports entertainment and/or a
spiritual ancestor of the kind of competitions that emerged in the 2000s,
game-show fans also count it as a game show. The contestants don’t sit down or
stand at podiums while playing, the hosts are more like sports announcers than
game-show emcees, and the prize money isn’t emphasized if it’s mentioned at
all, but “game show” covers a range of programs that varies in width for each
person.
Somewhere in the nexus of MTV’s
trashy game shows, the physical challenge game shows, and the resentment toward
others that fuels contestants on elimination-based reality shows and The Weakest Link alike is Dog Eat Dog. After training together for
a day, six players vote to see which one is subjected to a challenge to avoid
temporary elimination. If that player succeeds, though, he or she chooses the
player who loses his or her chance at the big money. The last two compete to
see who plays a trivia showdown against the other five players. That’s
definitely a game show, but another NBC show adapted from overseas in that time
period is hardly the kind of thing that could be given that label.
On Fear Factor, teams or individuals take part in stunts, with one
team or individual being eliminated after each round. A program following such
a format would usually be what one would consider a game show if it were
lighter and had less demanding challenges, but the stunts are so dangerous that
each episode begins with a disclaimer warning viewers not to try them, and the
content is definitely not suited to those accustomed to game shows that are
anything but abhorrent. The controversy surrounding rigged quiz shows of the
‘50s – no one in general would argue against calling them game shows – is of a much
different nature from the notoriety that drew an indignant response from the
American Humane Association, caused one particularly offensive episode of the
revival to go unaired in the US, and made it so millions will not dignify the
program by calling it a game show.
Even if you haven’t turned back
on what you know about game shows, this has a chance of being a ridiculous
question: is American Idol a game
show? There’s a competition for a prize, and it certainly isn’t a sport or an
awards show. Or is it, and by extension other talent competitions of its kind,
a variety show? To be fair, talent competitions are not new on TV; Arthur Godfrey’s Talent Scouts had the
top ratings of the 1951-52 season. Of course, Idol has many differences, including voting by phone instead of
having to be in the studio audience to vote, ongoing competition instead of short-term
competitions, and six years at the top of the ratings instead of just one. So
talent competitions aren’t game shows. Where does that put The Gong Show, though?
The current talent competitions
and some big-money game shows are blended in parts with reality competitions;
they actually show a slice of the contestants’ lives and what goes on off the
set instead of just having a short moment where the contestant recounts these
things. It’s what separates programs that actually show date footage from Love Connection. Video from people’s
lives, as well as elements of contemporary big-money game shows, distinguish Minute to Win It from any incarnation of
Beat the Clock. But while The Gong Show is widely considered a
game show for many reasons, Star Search
doesn’t quite get that label, and American
Idol is instead in a category it helped start.
Competitions to see who would be
the best pop singer may not count as game shows, but shows that test knowledge
of lyrics to songs fall under that banner, both the light competition The Singing Bee and the dramatic,
big-money Don’t Forget the Lyrics!
Though short-term cooking competitions like Ready
Set Cook and Iron Chef could be
called “game shows” in a loose sense, the same might not go for Top Chef, which follows a long-term
elimination format. There are clear-cut distinctions between game shows and reality
shows now that the latter has entered the vernacular, but shows from a
different era of broadcasting might be lumped together with game shows even
though they were not. In 2001, TV Guide ranked People are Funny among its 50 Greatest Game Shows of All Time, a
list that also includes Survivor and Love Connection. There was a home game
for This is Your Life, or at least a
board game licensed by the show.
STRAY PARAGRAPH
Some game shows have one game to
be played within the constraints of the time slot – or two in the case of the Pyramid shows – but others, from
old-school shows like the daytime Match
Game to big-money shows like Who
Wants to Be a Millionaire, often start by joining a game in progress and
finish by leaving a game in progress to be continued on the next episode. In
that sense, each different game is not self-contained, but each game qualifies
as short-term, even considering the element of returning champions. This is in
contrast to reality competitions that eliminate one contestant from the pool
every episode – or two in the case of American
Idol.
OUTTAKES
As I type this, I have a football
game on Fox in the background, and among the promos are for the latest season
of American Idol and for yet another
celebrity competition called Stars in Danger:
The High Dive. This may force me to bring up recent offerings earlier than
I would have.
Purists refuse to call Fear Factor a game show at all, and some
may not know what to call it.
COMMENTS
I’ve been thinking about this
since about 12:40 pm, and I type this sentence at 5:40 pm. I even brought the
laptop downstairs so I could get a better view of the football games on TV. But
that’s how much I’ll contemplate the topic. The length of this essay is almost
2,200 words after five hours of thinking.
Other topics I could bring up are
British panel shows like Whose Line is it
Anyway, Have I Got News for You, QI, I’m
Sorry I Haven’t a Clue, and so on; the brief flirt with other forms of
programming that GSN experienced in 2003… but I’d better keep it on topic.
I’m not sure where to put Takeshi’s Castle, Ninja Warrior, and/or Wipeout
in the grand scheme of this paper without messing with it too much. And should
I mention what I’ve heard about El Gran
Juego de la Oca anywhere?
Early on, I intended for this to
be a philosophical sort of thing, recalling a few of the things I looked at in
philosophy classes.
