Hi.
My name is Travis, and I like Wipeout.
There… I feel a little better. After all, the first step to overcoming a problem is to admit that you have one.
Wipeout is a new hour-long game show on ABC that’s loosely based on the half-hour game show Most Extreme Elimination Challenge, which is a redubbed parody of an hourlong Japanese game show called Takeshi’s Castle, which I assume was the main reason for the adoption of the Eight Amendment to the Constitution. The basic premise of the show: snarky hosts berate and belittle 24 contestants as they try to survive an over-the-top obstacle course designed to send 23 of them back home in, if not pinewood boxes, then full-body casts.
Wipeout is all that’s wrong with television: it’s pointless, unintelligent, lowest-common-denominator drivel that replaces plot with mindless violence.
That being said, Wipeout is the perfect antidote to the modern American gameshow, and let’s face it, modern American gameshows suck. Big-sweaty-donkey-balls-style suck.
I blame Who Wants to be a Millionaire. Once upon a time, game shows were fast-moving tests of knowledge, but Regis Philbin transformed them into lumbering behemoths wherein “ordinary” people — by which network executives apparently mean “people whose primary special skill is the ability to convert oxygen into carbon dioxide” – to answer a few painfully retarded multiple-choice questions (while also being given the opportunity to cheat occasionally) while simultaneously expounding at length about how difficult the task is each time. And they still can lose.
The worst is this Deal or No Deal show, in which a single contestant…. picks suitcases. And whines. A lot. For a fucking hour. It’s all the fun of shopping for luggage with a irritable two-year old in tow. Actually, that sounds like a little more fun, since chances are very good that the guy at the store who’d be helping you would not be Howie Mandel.
These shows remind me of the Simpsons episode in which a Japanese game show host explains a cultural difference between game shows — American gameshows reward knowledge. Japanese gameshows punish igorance. — except that modern America gameshows simply “reward” without requiring “knowledge” anymore.
It is fitting that the Japanese-based Wipeout, then, simply “punishes” without requiring “ignorance.” The complete antithesis of modern American gameshows, it whittles twenty-four contestants to one in sixty minutes, and it only shows a contestant’s whining immediately prior to having that contestant find themselves in excrutiating pain as they “wipeout” by being, say, punched in the face by a hydrolic boxing glove, or snapped in half over a giant rubber ball, or whacked off a tall pedistal by a rapidly rotating toothbrush. Whereas other games shows amuse themselves by putting me in pain with the stupidity of their contestants, Wipeout puts its stupid contestants in pain for my amusement.
…But I can quit it, cold turkey, anytime. I swear.
