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Your so stupid game show4/1/2023 ![]() Well, I just wanted to say that, you know, it's fun to - it's good to laugh. E-mail: Stephanie's with us, Stephanie calling from Sedona, Arizona. But it's really the 18 to 49, 18 to 34-year-old demographic that they're really looking for.ĬONAN: Well, let's get some callers in on this conversation: 80. And you know, if other people come along, that's great. But to get young people, you have to, I take it, make the questions a little more frivolous, make them a little bit more about pop culture, what young people would presumably know, and so it's engineered in a way to get them to tune in. The advertisers want young people to watch television. FARHI: Well, not even so much the lowest common denominator, but a specific common denominator: young people. Television is in every home around the world, basically, so it doesn't have to reach higher, it can reach lower, and in fact that's exactly what has happened with quiz shows.ĬONAN: So again, going for the lowest common denominator, something television's pretty good at. So the quiz shows tried to be high-minded at the same time as the rest of the programming. And you had opera on television, you had live drama on television, you had a lot of things that to our mind these days look very intellectual and very prestigious, and so were the quiz shows. Television was trying to prove itself as a medium, it was trying to be respectable, and so it was also trying to be sort of educational. FARHI: Well, as I mentioned, it's a different era of television. And why is this happening, and who's to blame, Paul Farhi? And the questions were so obscure and so amazingly tough that people would probably turn off the television set now because they're just too hard.ĬONAN: And my producer has just informed me that I said the dumbing down of talk shows.ĬONAN. ![]() FARHI: People tuned in to watch experts, to watch these amazing brainiacs display their knowledge. The famous quiz show scandals involved the show "Twenty-One." The questions were mind-bogglingly tough, certainly in and of themselves, but also in comparison to what passes for quiz show questions these days.ĬONAN: So the idea in those days was to celebrate, I guess, people who knew a lot of stuff. In the 1950s - certainly a different television era - in the 1950s it was about the elites, about, you know, these grandiose displays of knowledge. FARHI: Well, I think they're a lot dumber, especially compared to the talk shows of the 1950s. PAUL FARHI (Reporter, Washington Post): Hi, Neal.ĬONAN: And just how dumb are today's talk shows? And I guess we're comparing them to the talk shows of the 1950s and '60s. E-mail: You could also the conversation on our blog at npr.org/blogofthenation.Īnd we begin with Paul Farhi, reporter for the Washington Post, who wrote a story called "Easy Does It: With New Quiz Shows, 'Boob Tube' Earns Its Name." And he joins us here in Studio 3A. And why is this happening? Our number is 80, 800-989-TALK. Are quiz shows getting dumber? Do you like it that way? Examples, please. But first, the dumbing down of TV quiz shows, and we need to hear from those of you playing the home version of the TALK OF THE NAME game. ![]() Later on in the program, one woman's quest for a shopping bag from every single store at the Mall of America. One of them is 74-time "Jeopardy" champion Ken Jennings, so we're going to ask him to put all of his answers in the form of a question. According to its Web site, it measures adults' lack of knowledge, which raises the question: Are quiz shows getting dumber? We're going to hear from two guests who answer that one yes. "5th Grader" proclaims itself an atypical game show. And pretty easy, right? Well, that was the $2,000 question on the premier of Fox's new hit quiz show "Are You Smarter Than a 5th Grader," in which grownups compete against nine, 10, 11-year-olds. We exhale what gas that plants need in order to live? Well, if you answered carbon dioxide, you're correct. I'm Neal Conan in Washington.Īnd here's a question for you.
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