BobHarris.com - Detroit News visits Trebekistan

Books! Actual books!

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-- Joss Whedon, creator, Buffy the Vampire Slayer

"I haven't seen Jeopardy! since I was a kid, and yet I was charmed and amused by Bob Harris's fascinating and surprisingly suspenseful book. Through sheer force of personality, he takes this brainy TV show and makes it funny and easy to relate to."

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-- Brad Rutter, top money-winner in Jeopardy! history

Books I'm Getting

Who Hates Whom:
Well-Armed Fanatics, Intractable Conflicts,
and Various Things Blowing Up —
A Woefully Incomplete Guide™

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— Ken Jennings, author of Brainiac: Adventures in the Curious, Competitive, Compulsive World of Trivia Buffs

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— John Hodgman, author of The Areas of My Expertise
and correspondent for The Daily Show with Jon Stewart

"All three [presidential] candidates should read all three of these [recommended] books, but McCain gets first crack at Bob Harris's "Who Hates Whom“... a lighthearted overview of the insurrections and civil wars in the world today."

— Steven Pinker, author of The Stuff of Thought, in the New York Times Book Review

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Juan Cole

Detroit News visits Trebekistan

Tag it now -

Tuesday, 17 April 2007

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.