Opportunity Knocks
Tuesday 8 PM, ABC
The Premise: A family game show, with the twist being that it’s about the family. They show up in your neighborhood, and ask the various family members questions about one another.
The Personnel: I am not familiar with host J.D. Roth, however, according to our good friends at IMDB, he has also hosted Masters of the Maze, Moolah Beach, Nuts for Mutts, The Walt Disney World Easter Parade, and Sex Wars.
The Poop: I’m having a hard time with this. On the one hand, it strikes me as almost masturbatory. (Yes, I said “hand” and “masturbatory”. If I were more clever, I’d finish the joke.) Like last season’s Amne$ia, it’s just not interesting to anybody but the family taking part in any given episode.
Isn’t playing along the fun part of watching a game show? That’s why people watch Wheel of Fortune. We play at home and get the puzzles before the contestants do. (And by “we”, I mean “my grandparents”.) That’s sort of the point, isn’t it? But this is like watching Wheel of Fortune in a foreign language. I can’t play along! I don’t know the Gutierrez Family! I will never think about them again once the show ends, but here I am, learning trivia about them.
What I don’t like is the way it inflates “pointless crap about me and my life” to the same level as “actual knowledge”. Wouldn’t it be better to possibly learn things while watching a game show? I think 90% of what I know came from watching Jeopardy! as a child. Here, we learn which Jonas Brother is a teenage girl’s favorite. Sure, it’s a lot of fun for the contestants and their friends, but that excludes the vast majority of the viewing audience. Heck, if I were a contestant on this show, even I wouldn’t be interested in watching that episode. It’s an ugly trend that’s based in social networking sites and You Tube – Everything that you think or feel is exactly as important as everything else in the world, and if everything is equally important, then nothing’s important.
On the other hand, if I were a kid, I’d probably enjoy this. It’s sort of like I’m Telling, the brother-sister version of The Newlywed Game that only Myndi and I watched. There’s something fun about basically nice people playing a game that’s easy and winning money. When you’re a kid, just seeing other people having fun is fun in and of itself.
And it is nice viewing for the family hour. Imagine everybody watching and enjoying themselves. Maybe it spurs conversations amongst the family, as they talk about how they would answer those same questions. And really, that’s one of the great things television can do. I have a group of friends who make an appointment to watch The Office together every week, and that’s really nice. In the age of DVR, we’ve lost sight of the way that the TV schedule holds us together. There used to be an immediacy – you watched your show at 8 PM, and you shared it with everybody else. I like the idea of a family watching a show together, even if it’s not to my taste.
The Prognosis: Just because it might lead to nice family moments and discussions doesn’t mean I have to watch the damn thing again.
