Jeopardy! is the best, hands-down. I watch two episodes of it every day (there’s an old rerun on the Game Show Network), and I’m still not sick of it. There is no other TV show, period, that I can watch that much without getting surfeited.
Family Feud was way ahead of its time in the weird irony involved in all of it; Richard Dawson was more social critic than emcee in the way he’d play the role of the genteel suitor, kissing hands and playing interested as an entire family went bonkers onstage because they’d just won seventy-six dollars.
The entire premise of Family Feud was incredibly surreal: The families would pose at the beginning, as if for an old daguerrotype family photo, then leap into action accompanied by some kind of crazed, “old-timey” hillbilly fiddle music, like the most wretched excess of Hee-Haw. Once the game had begun and all family members had been introduced (“This is my nephew Ben. He sells plumbing.”), the families were rewarded, not for coming up with correct answers, but for giving answers the most like what the “survey says.”
I.e., families were rewarded for being so “average” that their answers would most closely approximate the general results of a survey. It was like an exercise in Orwellian Darwinism, if that makes sense.
Another groundbreaking show that deserves mention, and the first one I can think of that really went crazy with flouting (and thereby exposing) the conventions of the genre, was Remote Control on MTV. Remember? With Colin Quinn as the sidekick? That was some crazy, brilliant stuff, with the “Dead or Alive?” category and the chairs that would fling the losers up and backward through the wall, where they appeared to be eaten by ghouls. That was the predecessor to Distraction, and the short-lived but wonderful You Don’t Know Jack, and Fear Factor, and even Survivor (which, as PeterWiggen rightly points out, is a game show too).
The Japanese were way ahead of us Westerners in all this stuff, though; when I lived there back in the '80s, they already had shows that we would today call “reality shows,” on which people had to eat disgusting things and do terrifying, dangerous stunts and humiliate themselves in public. (At least that’s what I assume was going on; I would watch them sometimes, but I didn’t speak Japanese.)
Yeah, I’ve probably spent too much time thinking about this stuff.
