What is...?

The Washington Post today ran a story lamenting that quiz shows just aren't as smart as they used to be. As you might expect, according to the author viewers are to blame, and while I usually bemoan television's attempts to attract the lowest common denominator, in this case I think there might be more to the current trend in trivia shows than just appealing to the intellectually lazy.

For instance, the author takes Jeopardy! - a weeknight staple in our household - to task for having become lighter fare since it's original run in the 1960s.

Nowadays...the categories are narrower -- fewer foreign phrases, more pop culture
categories -- and the questions are often written to point toward an answer.

I think that's part of the trick of Jeopardy!. It obviously helps if you know the answer outright, but part of what makes it fun to watch/play along with is the fact that you often can use the clue to retrieve some subconscious knowledge you wouldn't necessarily know you knew, but which is brought to the front of your brain simply by some random association.

To a similar extent, the same can be said of 1 vs. 100, a show I find myself enjoying, surprisingly enough. The questions are relatively easy for the most part, but I'm not sure the game is necessarily about being well-read the way Jeopardy! might be. The trick again is in paying attention to the right part of the question.

My feeling isn't so much that quiz shows are being dumbed down, but rather that the format has evolved into something different. What may be happening is a shift from celebrating intelligence to demeaning the lack thereof. The author quotes a broadcast scholar who claims viewers won't watch something that doesn't make them feel good about themselves, and since we live in a world of low expectations...

"We have accepted a degree of mediocrity in education. We don't really want to
work too hard to achieve success."

I don't think we accept mediocrity, i think we demand it, as evidenced by the second part of that quote. Regardless, I'm not sure that has anything to do with game shows being dumbed down. Case in point: the show really at the center of the piece is Fox's new Are You Smarter Than a Fifth Grader? I have to admit that I haven't seen it yet, but my guess is that is probably supposed to be more a form of satire than a typical quiz show. I think people like to see other people humiliated, a far bigger problem in my opinion than the intellectual ennui we've been suffering through for much of this decade.