I touched on this subject briefly in my last post, but so important do I think this topic is, that I'm writing a separate entry about it. A warning: there's a fair bit of game show geekage in this post, but if you can wade through it, I do think you'll find what I have to say here worth while.
I've mentioned that my friends Ben and Tim live up in Glendale near the Galleria mall. As a matter of fact, they live right across the street from the Glendale Public Library, and by a matter of coincidence, one evening Ben discovered that Ken Jennings, the quiz show virtuoso who won 74 consecutive games (and over $2.5 million in cash) on Jeopardy! was speaking there, promoting and signing copies of his book, Brainiac: Adventures in the Curious, Competitive, Compulsive World of Trivia Buffs. I made the 45-minute long drive up to Glendale (clear traffic that night, thank God) and sat with the Ruly Mob in the library's gathering room to hear Ken speak.
Apparently, Jennings had been originally contacted to do a memoir of his life, but he wisely decided that probably his life by itself wasn't something people wanted to read about, so he expanded the idea into something far more interesting: an examination of trivia itself, and the subculture that has sprung up around the idea of collecting facts. During his speech, Jennings touched on something I felt to be particularly profound and important. In his research he noticed that many people tended to look down on trivia buffs and geeks in general as freaks with sponge memories who just spew out facts in an effort to make themselves look superior and others look dumb in comparison and in doing so ruin things for everyone else. After all, this speaks to one of the oldest stereotypes of the "nerd:" the brilliant, socially-awkward outcast who'd rather sit at home and do nerdy things like read, mess around on their computers and play Dungeons and Dragons (actually, this kinda sounds like me, except I never cared much for Dungeons and Dragons myself, but I digress. :D)
It's also surely one of the reasons why newer TV producers (and seemingly, TV viewers in general) look down on traditional quiz shows as being outdated and boring. Bear with me as a I present a case in point: this past TV season, my friends and I in the game show fan community were absolutely thrilled at the announcement that a show called Temptation: The New Sale of the Century had been "greenlit" (that is, sold and syndicated to enough stations for the show to be worth producing a full season of) for the 2007-08 production year. Temptation is actually the show's Australian name; the original Sale of the Century was an American daytime show that aired in the 1970's and made its way to Australia (via producer Reg Grundy) initially as a ripoff show in 1971 called Temptation (the source of the newer show's name), and later, in 1980, as a bonafide Sale of the Century, Grundy actually having bought the format lock, stock and barrel between the end of the last show and the start of the new one. That version ran for 21 years as one of Australia's most popular and beloved shows. So popular and well-crafted it was, that Grundy started exporting clones of the show to other countries, including, and especially the U.S., laying the foundation for the importation of other international formats. Indeed, the show made so much money, that Grundy was able to retire and sold his international company to the group that is now known as FremantleMedia.
Which brings us back to the present. In 2005, the Australians revived the Sale of the Century format as Temptation: The New Sale of the Century. The Aussies have always played Sale as a big money format, and the newest incarnation made the game into a millon-dollar show while still preserving the important parts of the format. You see, Sale of the Century is essentially a cross between Jeopardy! and Let's Make a Deal. Three players compete, answering toss-up questions to earn money...except the questions are only worth five dollars each. The upside is that at certain points in the show, the player in the lead is offered an opportunity to "buy" a luxury prize worth hundreds, even thousands of dollars for only a few of the dollars they'd earned in the game. This leads to an important decision, which is to either buy the guaranteed goody, or hang on to their lead, hoping to win the game and use their total score to buy one of the big bonus prizes (including a luxury car and a monster cash jackpot for those persistent enough to get enough money to buy them) at the end of the show. This thought process reveals the secret of the show's appeal: the quiz game is really just a mechanic to get to the prizes and the decisions (and especially the ensuing suspense) that go with them. The questions themselves are meant to be quick and easy to come up with the answers to, and nowhere NEAR as difficult as something you might hear asked on Jeopardy! or Who Wants to Be A Millionaire? Simple enough, right?
Unfortunately, the North American arm of FremantleMedia has a poor track record of producing game show revivals; their sole long-term success has been the current incarnation of Family Feud which has shockingly had a longer run than either of its two illustrious predecessors, and has done so primarily by sticking to the traditional game format. This lesson - don't fuck with the winning formula - seems to be lost on FremantleMedia, who in "adapting" Temptation for the American market, and desperate to appeal to a younger audience, insisted on tinkering with the format. In doing so, they ripped off a large number of other game show formats, dumbed down the already easy questions and cheapened the prize budget. The stations the show was sold to saw what a train-wreck the show had been reduced to and quickly banished the show to substandard timeslots, resulting in downright vile ratings, and tons of potential revenue being flushed down the proverbial toilet.
All this because they didn't think younger viewers cared anything about intelligence.
That brings up Jennings's point...and mine, too; an issue reaching far more deeply into the human condition than what was wrong with a simple TV show. Our species has a tendency to put more weight on their emotions, and how they feel about a subject or a person than in what they know about them. Those who are in touch with their emotions or are better at eliciting desirable emotions are often given more credibility than those who have high intelligence and are legitimate experts in one or more given fields. The most obvious example of this I personally can think of is a job interview. When you go on one, your interviewer presumably already knows your qualifications for the job; the purpose of the interview is for the prospective employer to get a feel of you, to see if you are someone they feel comfortable hiring. Your task is to make a good impression on them, so they will like you. If they don't like you, they're not gonna hire you no matter what your qualifications are, right? The same is true of dating; you might be the nicest, smartest and even the most handsome/gorgeous thing on two legs, but if your prospective mate doesn't like you, they're not gonna want to have anything to do with you.
This weight on emotion is a major reason why our culture is obsessed with celebrity news, even over news about world events: ultimately celebrities are as human as anyone else, and watching what they do and what happens to them gives us catharsis from the hum-drum drudgery of our daily lives. This is why we forced to endure endless tales of scum like Paris Hilton and who-the-hell-are-you-and-why-should-we-cares like Kim Kardashian, and why we take heart when we hear the achievements of sports heroes like Lance Armstrong, or more recently Michael Phelps, or why Entertainment Tonight continues to regale us with the continuing story of Brad and Angelina's new family, when we're likely never going to meet these people in person. It's also why things like stem cell research, or gay marriage, or abortion or any number of controversial topics are so vehemently debated; they carry massive emotional baggage with them and some folks just aren't comfortable in dealing with that baggage, or feel so strongly about their point of view that they can't see eye to eye with those who disagree with them.
It's also why guys like me, who make a point of trying to remember little facts about the world around us, even stuff that may ultimately be truly useless, get such a bad rap. In many social situations, when someone like me is part of a conversation and manages to find an opportunity to present something they know in the context of that conversation, oftentimes - not always, mind you - there will be someone who will be offended. "Who does this jerk think he is?," they'll think. "He must think he's better than me. I can't stand this guy!" Their emotion gets the better of them, and instead of enjoying the little bit of new information for what it is, become bitter and angry towards the geek...even if it's just for a minute or two. This is a big reason why I was so bothered by the game night incident I mentioned in my last post. I was (and still am) concerned that in demonstrating my knowledge in the manner I did, I alienated someone else who I believe I had no business alienating in the first place; someone who, while clearly intelligent and well-read, was just playing the game to have fun and wasn't horribly concerned with winning. I was worried that I might have embarrassed and alienated not only her, but in the process my closest friend, who while he is just as competitive as the rest of the Mob, still wants his girlfriend to be happy and confident in herself...and rightly so, methinks.
Does this mean emotion is something to be discarded? Certainly not. Humans are social animals, and emotion is an important part of creating and maintaining social relationships. It's the glue that binds families together, enables individuals to achieve great feats, makes it possible for our culture to function beyond just the pursuit of personal wealth. But it's our intelligence that makes us able to know how to interpret our emotions, how to act in certain situations, what to do to make a living for ourselves and our families, how to give pleasure and joy and happiness to our loved ones. Without one, the other is useless.
It would do our species good to try and remember to work to balance the two. It's not an easy task; we humans are very much ruled by our emotions. But I believe we're up to it. And if we can do it, we may yet survive.
What do you think? Or should I say....how do you feel?
