Conveyor Belt of Love–We predicted this show was some kind of harbinger of doom, but it was actually fairly
harmless. That being said, the title alone is so awful, we had to put it on the list. And most of the contestants were from the shallowest part of the zero-entry gene pool, which doesn’t exactly say anything good about our society. Thankfully, this series was incredibly short-lived.
Downfall – This was the short-lived game show where a conveyor belt (another conveyor belt-based show!) dropped prizes off of a building while contestants answered questions asked by the WWE’s Chris Jericho. Right off, you can probably tell that this didn’t make for compelling television. But even beyond the shaky premise, so much was wrong with Downfall. For example, this was the only game show we’ve ever seen where the prizes were completely generic. No brand names were used when describing the prizes – contestants could win “a car” or “a computer”. It was very strange, and gave the impression that the show didn’t have sponsors and Chris Jericho was just giving away some stuff he had laying around. And then there was the repeated insistence that the falling prizes were only “prize replicas”. We contend that if the prop department makes a pool table out of wood and felt, then that’s an actual pool table, and not a replica of a pool table. (Once, the prize was a year’s worth of bottled water, and they assured us that the bottles of water falling were replicas. Replicas made by putting water in bottles.) Jericho made for a genial host, but he tripped over his words far too often. Not good when he’s reading questions in a time-based format. And the contestants were, to put it nicely, a little dim. One struggled to identify the current President. (Though we’ll always have a soft spot for the guy who kept calling the host “Kurt”, because he thought he was talking to Kurt Angle.) The whole series was misconceived and poorly executed, and it’s hard to believe it ever made it onto network TV.
