I consider myself a fan of both trivia as well as pop culture, and therefore, one of the television shows that I am most interested in right now is VH1's "World Series of Pop Culture." The show itself is becoming sort of a pop culture phenomenon, in that it is becoming just as popular as some of the subject matter that it is asking questions about.
It's a game show, but not in the typical, Pat Sajak-style game show that's basically the same show every single week with different contestants. The show is like "Jeopardy," but it's only like "Jeopardy" if you got rid of all the questions about the French Revolution and South American geography and only asked the questions about Steven Spielberg movies.
What's great about the show is that it doesn't take itself seriously. That's the problem with a lot of game shows: they just take themselves too seriously. Shows like "Survivor" and "The Great Race," which are basically just elaborate game shows, take themselves way too seriously: the only interesting moments on the show are when the contestants aren't having fun.
Audiences of those shows are only happy when somebody is crying or eating a roasted rat. And that's not the way game shows should be. Game shows, ultimately, are pretty lame, and it's really only when a game show is self aware of its own niche in TV land does it become worth watching.
This is probably why "Lingo" Is the most popular show on the Game Show Network: watching Chuck Woolery's own self-loathing and contempt for his own job makes for fascinating and wonderful television. And that's what's so great about "The World Series of Pop Culture." All the contestants know that they're total dorks and they're embracing and exposing their inner geek in front of a national audience for the chance to win a quarter of a million dollars. The host relates with the contestants in that everyone involved knows that the questions being asked are totally ridiculous and that anyone who knows the answers to the questions is a total loser with too much time on their hands, but the sardonic attitude regarding the whole thing is what makes the show entertaining in the first place.
Even though I think that this show is easily one of the most entertaining things put on television in the last five years, one still has to take into consideration that the entire concept is the brainchild of VH1 and has the general atmosphere of a drunk fumbling with a key ring trying to open the front door. The show is called "The World Series of Pop Culture," but for the purposes of the show, pop culture is defined as music, movies and television in a post-1982 world. The show could accurately be retitled "A General Review Quiz Regarding Every Lame Retrospective VH1 Special We've Ever Run."
Pop culture cannot be pegged down as simply music, movies and television from the past 25 years. It's so much more than that. VH1 is totally ignoring the other artistic fields that make up the pop culture scene. Comic books, literature, politics, the Internet, the arts, not to mention everything that took place before 1982: all these things make up the pop culture scene. Pop culture is an immensely broad term, and VH1 has a very specific idea of what it is.
One thing that VH1 seems to be obsesses with, yet makes up a very small part of the pop culture scene, is the private lives of celebrities. Who cares what Rosie O'Donnell does in her free time? VH1 is making people think that by reading People Magazine they're studying pop culture, when, in reality, reading a People Magazine is the same intellectual equivalent as bashing your head against a cinder block.
Write to Paul at pjmetz@bsu.edu
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