Prisoner of Trebekistan gets a nod in this Detroit News story about the way quiz shows seem to have changed over the years.
I’d like to elaborate, btw. There’s a frequent charge that our country has dumbed down, and if you compare the questions currently asked on Are You Smarter Than a Fifth Grader? (which I didn’t even know existed) to the questions asked on, say, Twenty-One, there seems to be a prima facie case.
And granted, there are days when I think the future of quiz shows will be a show called Who Can Push The Big Red Button, with ten beautiful girls standing next to ten three-foot-wide buttons, nine of which are blue. Pushing the lone red button gets the contestant $50,000. Can the contestant do it? Join host Don Imus and find out.
But the big-money questions on Jeopardy! are still pretty damn tough. The big-money Millionaire questions are, too. Just like in the 1950s. I think shows like Deal Or No Deal don’t tell us anything about any possible changes in our knowledge or intelligence; people have enjoyed games of chance since long before TV was invented. Deal Or No Deal’s current popularity may only tell us that our culture intuits luck as a factor in economic success a bit more, and if so, that would be a logical reflection of some of the structural changes we’ve seen in the last quarter-century or so.
There was a time when working-class people like my dad could very predictably get a good, stable job, buy a home, and have a relatively stable life, purely through hard work, which was extremely well-valued. Not quite so much anymore. Interesting to notice that Deal Or No Deal’s contestants seem to be consistently working class.
Talking out of my ass, as usual. But that’s what I think, anyway.
Oh, and none of this is in Prisoner of Trebekistan. Which is barely even about Jeopardy! in some ways. But a lot of you know that already.
