Ask A Genius 572 – Game Shows Aren’t to be Played Around With
Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2020/10/17
[Beginning of recorded material]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: What is your gripe with game shows? There’s a lot of context here.
Rick Rosner: So I’ve worked on more than half a dozen game shows. I was co-creator of a game show. I’ve been a contestant on quiz shows. Five of which include running through a contestant. pseudo quiz show. I’m booked to be in the contestant pool for a quiz show next week. If they’re doing it very Covid compliant, I’m going to go get tested for Covid. Then I’ve got a day in the studio where everybody is just in masks and distancing, the prize for this thing is three contestants and the winner get a thousand dollars and gets the chance to compete in the grand prize round to potentially turn the one thousand dollars into ten thousand dollars. To me, this is just bullshit. There’s a show on all the time on the cooking channel. They give people baskets of weirdly assorted ingredients and force them to make dishes out of them.
Anyway, so, I spent about four hours on just getting ready to be on a quiz show today until they kicked me out because I knew too many of the people working on the show, which is something they can’t allow because it is left over from the quiz show scandals of the 50s that they want to avoid any kind of appearance of impropriety. So, I got a free Subway sandwich out of it. But my general gripe is the exploitativeness owners of competition shows have, where most people leave with nothing. On the run of the mill shows like Chopped, for instance, it is a cooking competition show that’s on all the time on the Food Network and they have four chefs on, and three of them leave with nothing and one leaves with ten grand. The overall budget for an episode of that show is $100,000. Then you have these shows like Wipeout or whatever, which was replaced. I guess this is kind of a violent golfing show called Holey Moley. These shows people go on like – we’ve got to go back in time, 15 years – Fear Factor. I think probably started out with every episode you start out with 15, 18 contestants. Put them through hellacious tortures.
And I don’t know. I think the only person left standing at the end got any money and I’m sure relative to the show budget it was a pittance. It is bullshit that the prize budget should be less than 5% of the show’s overall budget. It just seems like bullshit that they’re getting away with exploiting people. These people are exploitable in the name of being on TV. It is a little like what collegiate athletics is like. The players in the big sports, football, basketball make millions of dollars, tens of billions of dollars every season for their schools, what they get are shitty and incomplete educations and injuries and their bells rung. So, maybe 20 years down the line, they have CTE, brain damage. It is just bullshit.
These shows where people bake a cake or who can bake the best Halloween cake and they’re in there working on this shit for twelve hours building this fucking cake that’s twelve feet tall competing for twelve grand. I know it is cool to be on TV. Maybe, it helps some of their businesses, just the being on TV. But I don’t know. It just seems contrary to the promises being made; people don’t do the math, including myself, so few people know I was on Jeopardy! And I didn’t do the math on how few people actually win on Jeopardy! during the months and months that Ken Jennings was on Jeopardy!. Only one person, one person on Jeopardy!, fucking Ken Jennings wiping out like 174 other contestants. At least now, Jeopardy! gives third place a thousand bucks and second place two thousand dollars. Just go kind of chintzy, but it is better than nothing. That’s it. That’s just my gripe. A lot of TV is both being on TV and working on TV and entertainment industry in general is there are a lot of jobs that are exploitative at the bottom or middle or even towards the middle upper of the pyramid. You hang in there because you want to, maybe, eventually, be one of the people who rakes in all the bucks at the top of the home.
We call the Disney company a bad name, because Disney it is known for working people really hard for, maybe, not the best rewards, except as you climb the ladder until you’re in the position of Bob Iger, who makes fifty million dollars a year. I’m sure his lieutenants, the VP’s of Disney make four hundred and fifty thousand dollars or something. There are plenty of jobs low level at Disney with really shit pay. Anyway where you’re working for the love of the company and a double minimum wage.
Jacobsen: Okay.
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