Channel Surfing

With very few exceptions, the quality of summer television, mainly low-budget reality programs, isn't great (consider Wipeout and Celebrity Circus). Hence, you can imagine my enthusiasm when I stumbled upon the premiere episode of the new ABC program I Survived A Japanese Game Show a few weeks back.

The show's American participants compete on the Japanese game show Majide, which, to us unfamiliar Americans, is quite the spectacle. The wacky games run the gamut from "Pedal Fast or Big Splash!" (in which a person must pedal a tricycle within the "red zone" on a treadmill or else risk sliding backward into the looming pool of icewater) to the Human Claw game (analogous to the claw games that one plays in a movie theater or restaurant to win exciting toys, except a human is substituted for the claw). Other aspects of the show add to the fun: Japanese crowd members are given noisemakers to shake at appropriate times, and it's always amusing to watch the show's host make snide remarks about the American contestants to the crowd in Japanese.

What I find most entertaining about the show, though, is how seriously the competitors take themselves. How can you be driven to the brink of tears after "letting your team down" in the Human Claw challenge? How can you be ruthlessly determined to defeat your opponent at games such as "You Look Funny Stuck on That Wall," in which competitors dressed in Velcro suits must jump onto a wall and fit their bodies into the bizarre shapes outlined on it? This show is almost a parody of traditional reality programs; it proves that we Americans will take even the most absurd tasks seriously when $250,000 is dangled in front of us.

Despite the incessant video confessionals and inter-competitor drama that clutter all reality shows, I'll continue to watch I Survived A Japanese Game Show, if only to find out if the competitors will realize that they are being made to look like complete fools on national TV.

(A note about the blog's title: some might contest my claim that NFL Fever 2000 is history's greatest computer game. I urge all doubters to probe the depths of the Web to find the game's free demo. Granted, you only get five minutes of game play, but I assure you that you'll be hooked and will have memorized the entire rosters of the 1999 Atlanta Falcons and Denver Broncos within a few days.)