The classic television game show is one of the simplest pleasures available to the sedentary, socially maladjusted people we used to call “couch potatoes”. An average Joe is required to perform a task – ranging from answering a trivia question or spinning a large, colorful wheel tokeeping a hand on a Toyota Land Cruiserfor as long as possible – in exchange for the possibility of winning a cash prize (ora truck). For the viewer, there is the satisfaction of believing, perhaps falsely, that you could win the prize if you were in the contestant’s place. Maybe you identify with that contestant and actively root for their success. Or perhaps you just want to see some poor bastardshot out of a cannon, like on TBS’s dearly departed series Wipeout. Whatever your pleasure might be, it’s not an uncommon or esoteric one.
We watch game shows because they are basic human drama distilled into an easily repeatable format. TV development executives have tried to modernize it with the fancy graphics of something like NBC’sThe Wallor the gratuitous flesh-baring of the 2000s disasterpiece Are You Hot, in which a panel of “celebrity” judges such as Lorenzo Lamas critiqued people on the number of visible abs on their bodies. The simpler a game show premise –guessing the costof basic household items,answering multiple choice questionsin a spooky room, ordoing menial tasksfor a man who combs his hair forward – the better. Perhaps this is why my initial reaction to thepress releasefor the forthcoming mini-seriesGreg Gutfeld’s What Did I Miss?, on the Fox Nation streaming service, was so immediately negative.
In the new series, Gutfeld (who made an entire career out of sporting a perpetually self-satisfied smirk that turns liberals into feral animals running around in circles and urinating on the floor) quizzes contestants on the headlines. The unusual part: these contestants have been sequestered in upstate New York for three months, “with no contact to the outside world – no phones, internet, television, or social media” – not unlike the short-livedBBC series The Bubble. Some of the headlines Gutfeld offers are real. Some are fabricated. It is up to the sad group of media-starved test subjects to ferret out what’s real from what isn’t.
Imagine, a blissful 90 days of not knowing what is happening outside your window. A three-month vacation of regular meals, uninterrupted sleep and zero temptation to spend hours scrolling TikTok for videos ofpeople marinating chicken in NyQuil. Doesn’t that sound lovely? Jared Letospent 12 days in blissful meditative isolationat the start of the Covid pandemic and when he came back into civilization, someone had to tell him he couldn’t eat inside at Nobu anymore. I feel bad for the guy, but he probably reminisces about those 12 days constantly.
The blessed contestants of What Did I Miss? were afforded not just 12 days of peace, but 90 of them. That’s almost eight times what Jared Leto got! And on the other side, there’s the chance to win $50,000. Hopefully the inflation rate doesn’t spike again and that money keeps its value. They’re gonna need it when they hear about those tariffs.
I suppose What Did I Miss? is more of a stunt than a traditional game show premise. Something closer toJoe Millionaire, a dating show where women vie for the attention of a man they think is rich but is actually not. How many times can you do something like that before the novelty wears off? You can only sequester so many people for three months before it starts to feel even cheaper than it is.
Of course, beyond the show being crass, it trivializes everything in our current moment of social upheaval and angst. “Isn’t that Donald Trump a wacky guy? He’s so wild, you’ll never guess the nutso stuff he got up to last week!” Being that this is a Fox Nation production starring Fox News’s favorite bobblehead doll, it stands to reason that the audience for the show is people who still find something funny about news headlines. We are far beyond the days when someone could riff for hours on the image ofGeorge HW Bush puking on the prime minister of Japan. That was, in fact, quite amusing. I mean, man, just look at him hurl! That’s something else, isn’t it, folks?
Donald Trumphas yet to vomit on a world leader, but we can certainly say he has soiled the basic functions of democracy. This is not speculating on what your crazy uncle got up to after he raided the liquor cabinet. Are these contestants expected to suss out the fake headline from choices like “sent an innocent man to asupermax prisonthat looks like it was ripped off fromJudge Dredd comics” or “threatened to tank the world economy just to see what would happen”? Call me a stick in the mud if you like, but I’m just not seeing the breezy joy of the standard game show in a series in which people must guess whose human rights have been denied and why.
TheFoxNation president, Lauren Petterson, said in the press release: “Truth can be stranger than fiction and who better to help isolated Americans catch up on the headlines they missed during an unprecedented news cycle than Greg Gutfeld.” The word I’m thinking of for all of this is not “strange”. “Grim”? Yes. “Dispiriting”? Sure. “Morally reprehensible”? Bingo.
Instead of calling what we are witnessing a series of preventable calamities, we refer to it as a “news cycle”. Life is reduced to the whims of the media machine. It is, itself, a game show played for big money, where the object is to do or say the worst thing possible so people pay attention to you. That seems like the aim of the entire endeavor – to use cheeky TV smarm to make all of this palatable. It flattens that which we should be outraged about into a sickly sweet pancake of game show pablum. I hope the winner of this farce refuses the money in exchange for being sent back to the little house in upstate New York, free of the knowledge that human suffering is now government policy.
Dave Schilling is a Los Angeles-based writer and humorist