Has-Been Comedians and Your Grandmother's Favorite Show

I hate this show.

This show is the canker sore of prime time television. You know the kind of sore that hurts so bad to acknowledge, yet you find some twisted private pleasure in poking it with your tongue. Yeah. That‘s what this show‘s all about. Deal or No Deal is the epitome of American laziness. It sums up where we, as an American society, are in our meaningless lives. And this show could not have come at a better time, or era. Here, you have a show that takes skill out of the game show, the very show that has required, since the beginning of cavemen, the use of some semblance of skill.

For those of you who don’t know about the hottest (no wait, ugliest) thing to hit your television screen since Janet’s tit fell out of her dress and hit the back of the boob tube with a nauseating thud, here’s a quick rub… ahhh, rundown. Contestants stand up on a stage that looks like a mix between a sterile art gallery and a main showroom from some tacky, suburban dream store like Pier 1. Then, over-the-hill, obsessive compulsive, comedian, Howie Mandell, stands up their with a mobile phone looking like a creepy Mr. Clean at a sweet 16 party. He then asks the contestant, who has a suitcase next to him or herself (generally a stocky soccer mom or a loudmouth, greasy Italian guy), if they’d like to accept a set amount offered to them by the good people at CBS, or try to win the amount in the case. To win the amount in the case, the contestants must continually choose the “no deal” option and take a gamble by opening a variety of suitcases guarded by a swarm of matchstick models. Never have I seen so many anorexics in one place. Anyway, the ultimate goal is to hope the case you’ve chosen contains the one million dollars, the amount all Americans seem to strive for with religious fervor, and, for some reason, only seem to be able to achieve by being on some sort of ratings staggering game show. I don’t think anyone’s going to work anymore (well, at least stocky soccer mom’s and loudmouth, greasy Italian guys aren’t).

As I watched this show, which I generally don’t do out of sheer boredom, just like Flavor of Love, it dawned on me why this show is the worst thing sucking on the brains of us lazy fuckers. The game show requires no skill what so ever. There is no questions, besides “do you feel lucky?” and “what does your husband/wife do for a living?” which come up as small talk from Mandell. It’s simply people opening suitcases. If I wanted to watch that, I’d go over to Newark Airport and hang out at the baggage check area. At least maybe then I could watch a possible terrorist lose his homemade shirt-bombs or a politician with a suitcase full of eight year old boy. Now that’s what I call luck.

Where other ratings raping shows like Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? and Greed used to draw a huge American viewing audience, with the possibility to win a million dollars, those shows, at least, provided a challenge and cranial skill. In general game show tradition, the contestants had to apply some arcane knowledge to questions only a certain demography of nerds tended to know, as they hoped they might fall into that demography, just for the night, in hopes of winning the million. But Deal or No Deal offers nothing like that. The only time the brain has to function is when the contestant wonders if they can get a big enough hot tub in their suburban home if they win big. At a time when God-awful sitcoms arrive on the scene with a dagger already lodged in their chests, Deal or No Deal breaths a breath of rank air into the chests of primetime television. And at a time when we can only be bothered with loading more songs onto our iPods (only listening to the first thirty seconds of the song, so you can show you’re friends what other killer tunes you jammed into your digital fortress of eternal music), incoherent MYSPACE bulletin posts full of phrases like “U R DUM“, and the little conflict in the Mid-East we can’t fully view on our television, there’s no better time not to think in America. I mean, they’ve figured it out didn’t they? Who the hell has time, or the drive, to think on or about something as trivial as a game show?

Don’t get me wrong. There have been other terrible, parasitic game show which followed similar standards. There have been shows like Let’s Make a Deal where contestants had to make a life-or-death choice and choose what happened to be behind the door. They would then often get “zonked” when the door would open and a small, shit stained donkey would he-haw out on the stage, ready for the contestant to take home. This show worked well in the drug fueled era or the sixties and finally folded in the cocaine dust cloud of the late 70s. However, throughout it’s run, this show justified itself by humiliating these greedy guests for the low-life’s that they were on a game show that acknowledge that it was useless, trashy, and pure primetime pulp. Meanwhile, Deal or No Deal is purely safe. This show just promotes greed as contestants push themselves to the edge of their luck, endorsing needless material want and gambling. And we wonder why the kids on Super Nanny say things like “I want to be the pussy queen” and “Fuck off and die mom” at the age of four. I mean if you’re gonna watch some gambling on television, at least tune in and watch Rosie O’Donnell throw inedible chips on the table next to Jason Alexander, and his dead career, as they throw around poker lingo like censored sailors on a hokey celebrity poker game. Shit, even the in The Gong Show you had to be able to do something.

Deal or No Deal is too classy, too safe, too shallow, and too hopefully hopeless. It’s just what America needs and wants, because at this point we’re so far off the deep end in the bottomless pool of cultural and intellectual shit. There’s no going back now. Unless, of course, when they open up the case at the end of the game they find a dead puppy instead of the million bucks. That would serve them right and add a little spice to the show. Until then, we just have tolerate washed up comedians (Mandell, Bob Saget, whatever the hell William Shatner is calling himself these days), wear lint free suits, strutting around a clear stage with somber attitudes in place of their lame comedy (Yeah Yeah I know. Who cares if Bob Saget always talks about sucking dick in his stand-up? Is that really supposed to be that shocking? Maybe I’ll host a show of American home videos. But on my show the videos will be of families having sex with each other and then that would actually be both shocking, and maybe, sometimes, funny).

Where's Bobby's World on DVD anyway?

-Eric Truchan