When I was a kid, I wasn’t much for school. I was one of those clock-watchers — seated at 9 a.m., watching and waiting for the clock to hit 3 p.m. Let me outta here!
Looking back, the bulk of my intellectual, informational and logical storage facility likely was taken from TV, specifically game shows. Couldn’t get enough game shows.
There was the original “Password,” with Allen Ludden, “Concentration” with Hugh Downs and the first “Jeopardy!” with Art Fleming.
And on Saturday evenings, Ch. 4 aired the local quiz show, “It’s Academic,” hosted by Art James. “Can you take it, Chaminade High School?”
Heck, if Goodson-Todman had been a college, I’d have applied.
So when the Game Show Network, now known as GSN and seen in approximately 75 million US homes, began to develop original programming, replacing tapes of oldies, it was welcome news.
Shoulda known better. If you’re ever hankerin’ for an exhibition of American, TV-driven civilization and culture in systemic decline — if you’re ever in the mood to grow further depressed about where we’re headed — make a few random stops on GSN.
While the old “Newlywed Game” held some charm, included a few laughs and involved some deductive reasoning — some brain work — GSN’s new “Newlywed Game” targets three other regions: breasts, buttocks and genitals.
Two Saturdays ago, at 4:45 in the afternoon, quiz mistress Sherri Shepherd gave this multiple-choice question to the male newlyweds:
Which of your wife’s breasts do you favor, “Miss Righty, Miss Lefty or do you treat them both the same?”
Hmmm.
Or perhaps you’ll stumble into GSN’s “Baggage,” hosted by Jerry Springer, a “quiz show” so sexually charged — “How many threesomes have you had?” — that you’ll feel as if you’re eavesdropping on one of those pay-to-pant phone lines.
Then there’s “Love Triangle,” hosted by Wendy Williams and pitched by GSN as a quiz/talk show. It’s more like a program targeting voyeurs.
And for all the go-low garbage, there’s nothing for viewers to do, no real questions to consider, answers to be had, no knowledge to rely upon or gather, no work for the brain or challenge to the mind. There’s no game show in the game shows, just dirty talk.
GSN might be the saddest, most depressing network on TV. . .unless you stop at the Biography Channel, which should be renamed the Celebrity Bio Channel, or land on truTV, which is so loaded with scripted, dumpster-derived “reality” shows it should be falseTV, or spend some time on MTV and Spike TV, both of which are predicated on encouraging teens and young adults to act like remorseless punks.
But, hey, the new Dr. Seuss movie is rated PG, not G. It’s a Dr. Seuss movie, for crying out loud!
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Given that quality control and TV have little in common don’t— how many times have we seen pertinent info, speaker IDs and transcriptions disappear behind dancing, swelling, in-program promos along the bottom of the screen? — it should come as small surprise.
Still. . .
There’s a show on the ABC Family Network, “Switched at Birth,” that features several characters who are deaf. The words that they sign appear in print along the bottom of the screen. Sometimes.
Recently, viewers were unable to read the transcriptions as they were obstructed by computerized graphics promoting the network’s other shows.