Final Jeopardy

This final chapter discusses how the election of Donald Trump to the presidency alters the importance and influence of game shows on American life. The chapter examines works by Chuck Barris, Donald Barthelme, Max Apple, Philip K. Dick, and Jonathan Lethem to explore whether America will ever be free from the game show’s grasp, and how citizens can take control of the Land of the Game Show if escape is impossible. The chapter argues that resistance comes in the form of challenging the increasing triviality of American politics, encouraging readers to demand meaningful exchanges.

Fear Factor

The works discussed transpose the conceit of The Most Dangerous Game to the world of commercial broadcast entertainment, pitting characters against each other in competition for the ultimate prize: their own lives. Round Four discusses how the game show has come to represent the political and personal dangers of citizenship in an America governed by a late-capitalist consumerism that has morphed into a new brand of totalitarianism that turns people into trivial objects and trivial objects into subjects of the highest importance. The “reality” of these games and their rules represent a simulated and heavily mediated environment posing as real to conceal a sinister truth. In order to challenge the dominance of this inverted world order, the protagonists must first defeat totalitarianism’s synecdoche: the game show.

Love Connection

A game show seems to be the last place where one would find love; however, many artists have seen a deeper quest hidden inside the game show’s pursuit of trivial knowledge: the desire to know another person completely. Round Two argues that game-show discourse and romantic discourse are not as dissimilar as one would initially think. Films such as Ron Shelton’s White Men Can’t Jump and Jim Sharman’s Shock Treatment,works of fiction such as Alexandra Kleeman’s You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine and Helen De Witt’s Lightning Rods, and the unexpected-but-nevertheless-real subgenre of game-show erotica demonstrate the ways in which the game show can help lovers navigate the romantic hypermarket.

What’s My Line?

Round One explores works that use (and abuse) trivia to reveal how the hypermediated consumer culture of late capitalism traps individuals in a metaphorical isolation booth, unable to establish a stable sense of self. Just as the quiz-show scandals of the 1950s nearly killed the quiz show, works such as Quiz Show, Melvin and Howard,Slumdog Millionaire, and Chuck Barris’s “unauthorized autobiography” Confessions of a Dangerous Mind suggest that a rigged game presents an existential threat to the self. Amidst the pressure to conform to the norms of the community of television, individuals betray themselves to get ahead in America, often finding themselves trapped in the isolation booth of their social class. Further, Philip Roth’s novel Zuckerman Unbound,Kiese Laymon’s novel Long Division,and Robert Olen Butler’s story “The American Couple,” show how these questions of selfhood in the age of the game show can be exacerbated when the protagonist is an outsider to game-show culture.