Are You Smarter Than a 5th Grader? (FOX, 2007)
Finally, a television program that has the guts to just come out and say what it is.
I’ve been strangely fascinated by this new crop of game shows, including the popular Deal or No Deal and 1 vs. 100, as well as the not-so-popular Identity or Show Me the Money (with William Shatner, remember?). Basically, these are games that promise obscene amounts of money without requiring much of anything from the contestants. Deal or No Deal (this generation’s Let’s Make a Deal in more ways than one) is almost 100% luck based. 1 vs. 100’s questions read like questions from the children’s edition of Trivial Pursuit, while Identity made you decide whether that lady in the veil and hip scarf is a belly dancer or not.
But, finally FOX steps into the game and calls it like it is. Last night’s premiere of Are You Smarter Than a 5th Grader? gets points for honesty, but it ended up being one of the most horrifying TV shows I have ever seen. And not for the reasons you suspect.
Continuing the really bizarre tradition of hiring random comedians to host these things (I seriously didn’t know that was Howie Mandel until about 45 minutes in), Jeff Foxworthy takes advantage of his street cred and brings this one to the masses. I assume the masses saw it, since FOX has placed it directly after the current, limp season of American Idol. But, regardless, this show is either going to bomb, or it’s going to be huge. No middle ground possible.
Basically, your set up is this: you have a contestant (a college graduate, of course) faced with 10 questions from grade school text books in various subjects. They have a bunch of 5th graders sitting off to the side that can help them out (your standard three helps, like every other game show), and an audience just waiting to laugh at Foxworthy’s jabs at the contestant’s intellect: “Yeah, this game can get tough. After all, this is a question normally answered by 5-year-olds.”
The inaugural contestant was a UCLA and law school graduate and, from what I could tell, a pretty nice guy. Needless to say, he used all three helps on the first three questions (”In what month do we celebrate Columbus Day?”) and quit the game with $5,000, simply unable to continue.
Now, to be fair, it has been a while since most adults thought about how to figure out the area of a triangle or who the first president to be impeached was, but still, people. 1 vs. 100 obviously picks the dumbest people they can find to be on the show, but this program must be searching 1 vs. 100’s list of rejects (I can see the notes on their application: “Just too dumb, unfortunately.”). Close to three minutes of the 22 minute program were spent while a woman tried to remember The Mayflower. There really are certain things that become common knowledge, I would think, and you’d remember that Abraham Lincoln was not our first president.
Obviously this show can’t be taken as a complete reflection on the dumbing down of our society, but, well, maybe it can in a way. Our brains only tend to retain so much information, and facts which we don’t regurgitate on a somewhat regular basis can be replaced pretty easily by what happened on Lost last night. Where, exactly, are we focusing our energy? Or is it even important to remember half of what they taught you in grade school? Were we really learning, or just learning how to learn? What is the fucking point????!?!?!!?
But ou can’t get too deep or searching with this thing. It’s a game show. They get stupid people, ask them simple questions, and laugh when they get it wrong. No one will ever hit that $1,000,000 prize because even if a smart person snuck in, they’re still gonna get questions that really are difficult for someone 30 years out of the 2nd grade. But are these people actually stupid?
Regardless of how you view it, it’s about as simple-minded and exploitive a game show I’ve ever seen. Cute kids, smart people who are really dumb, and Jeff Foxworthy. It’s made specifically so we can feel better about ourselves, as if any of us would do any better as a contestant. No matter brilliant you are, Are You Smarter Than a 5th Grader? is shamelessly manipulative and monumentally unfair, like a carnival sideshow game where the bottle neck is just as wide as the ring.
Bottom line: awful.
Update 03.03.07: Here’s a nice little disclaimer that flashes by during the end credits…
“Members of the class were provided with workbooks that covered grade school level material in a variety of subjects. Some of the material could have formed the basis of questions used by producers in the show.”