By Linda Perlstein
Washington Post
Monday, April 5, 1999

Before the half-hour is up, here is what we learn about the gussied-up young woman who calls herself "Foxy": She cheated on her boyfriend, yet when she was stranded after a bad date, he was the one she called to come pick her up. She wore hooded sweat shirts in the summer to hide her hickeys.

Here is what we learn about the boyfriend, the strutting young man who calls himself "Lyrical": He used to put Foxy on hold, then go lift weights. He would lie about having written rap songs just for her. He had a thing for sex in public places.

No, this is not couples therapy. It is a TV game show — and because the studio audience decided it was Foxy's fault that the relationship flopped, Lyrical won a trip to Cancun.

Game shows are back — at least a dozen new ones this season, with more coming to both cable and broadcast outlets. But like MTV's frenetic and often scalding "Blame Game," they're not quite what you remember.

Twenty years ago, half of the most popular daytime TV programs were game shows — back then, Americans liked to watch happy people look smart and win great prizes. There's still some of that in the long-running hits "Wheel of Fortune," "The Price Is Right" and "Jeopardy!" But the new shows, both originals and revivals, are built on a foundation of shamelessness, sarcasm and outright humiliation.

"They're not fun and games anymore," says Steve Beverly, a communications professor at Union University in Tennessee. "They're hurt and games."

Tastes change, and Schadenfreude's the flavor of the day: Instead of relishing other people's good fortune, TV viewers take pleasure in their pain and pathologies. By borrowing elements of debasement from raunchy talk shows, game shows — cheap and easy to produce — have found a new road to success.

Programmers who discovered the power of sleaze over the past decade, as talk programs like "The Jerry Springer Show" became a mainstay of daytime TV, are finding ratings success in the new wave of game shows.

"The sleaziest TV gets the highest ratings," says Marc Berman, a consultant for Seltel, a New York firm that helps TV stations decide which programs to air. "If everybody's happy, everybody's hunky-dory, nobody wants to watch."

One show where everybody's plainly not hunky-dory is "Change of Heart" (the working title was the blunt "Trade Up"), seen here on WB's Channel 50. Producers send a boyfriend and girlfriend out on dates with someone new. Then, on the air, the original couple come clean about what they don't like about each other. Each new pair tell about their date while the old partner seethes for all to see. At the end of the show, boyfriend and girlfriend each hold up a card, which reads either "Stay Together" or — ouch! — "Change of Heart."

Sometimes one wants to stay together and the other doesn't, preferring the new date. Brutal. Sometimes one wants to stay together, and the other doesn't, preferring the new date — but the new date says "forget it." More brutal.

The people who make and air these shows, though, say they're not cruel, they're a public service. "What we do is simply force the issue of communication," says Scott St. John, creator of "Change of Heart."

Turning relationships into game shows isn't new — but the degree to which contestants expose themselves is. On "Love Connection," which just ended a 10-year run in syndication, guests complained about their dates, but they were just that: one-shot dates.

The contestants on "The Blame Game" are lovers. They've shared embarrassing secrets. They've brought each other home for Christmas. Now, the studio audience howls as the exes rack up points for 'fessing up to those secrets. The ex-partners accuse each other, through the stand-up comedians who pose as their lawyers, of being frigid or slutty.

Their old love letters are read aloud and mocked.

What makes it so easy for the couples to bust it all open on national television, some experts say, is that many of today's young adults view love and romance as a game. "I don't think there's any humiliation," says Stuart Atkins, a Beverly Hills psychologist who specializes in blame. "They take their relationships so lightly anyway, they just move on to someone else."

In addition, some argue, we're living in a time when shame is passe. Monica Lewinsky gamely appears on national television to apologize for her affair with the president and then goes on to describe it, in generous detail. Just as she didn't tell Barbara Walters to stuff it when asked to describe phone sex, the guests on these game shows have no problem baring all to a few million strangers.

What makes it so easy for people to watch? A touch of sadism, says Robert Thompson, a Syracuse University professor and director of the Center for the Study of Popular Television. "It's no coincidence we're getting these 'Greatest Car Chases' things at the same time we get these relationship things," he says. "In many ways it's the same thing: sticking your tongue into a decayed tooth. It hurts but you can't stop."

It may therefore come as no surprise that "Queen for a Day," the 1950s program wherein the contestant with the most pathetic sob story would win an ermine collar and dish detergent for life, will return to TV this fall. The show was so sappy that it became a target of numerous satires; now the pity party is business as usual.

Another remake in the works is "Three's a Crowd," the short-lived 1979 show in which two people — say, a secretary and a wife — competed to see who knew more about the contestant. In the Game Show Network's new version, expect to see a man appear with his current and former wives, or his wife and best friend. They'll try to guess how he would answer questions like, "Which one of your wife's friends would you want to have a one-night stand with?"

"Three's a Crowd" is one of many examples — along with new versions of "The Hollywood Squares," "Match Game," "The Dating Game" and "The Newlywed Game" — of the evolution from the double-entendre and when's-the-last-time-you-made-whoopee giggles of the 1960s and '70s to the unadulterated raunch of century's end. In "The New Newlywed Game," for example, an overweight biker dude and a blond babe in a pink satin pushup bra are trotted onstage, and the husbands have to pick which one their wives would rather sleep with.

And debasement comes in forms other than sex, such as on GSN's "Extreme Gong." The show features the same class of yodelers and ventriloquists as Chuck Barris's version, but adds a '90s touch: people who rip duct tape from their chest and stuff spaghetti up their nose.

In a 100-channel marketplace, where Nintendo and the Internet also loom large as competition, such full-blown "edge" is requisite for any producer who wants young people — the coveted demographic — to watch, says Jake Tauber, vice president for programming at the Game Show Network, which is carried by a thousand cable systems, including Howard County's, and District Cablevision's digital service. "Talk about boobs and buns was a little titillating and naughty back in 1976," he notes. "Well, today you turn on your television and on the networks you see bare rear ends, let alone what you see on cable."

The new genre of game shows takes the stuff of the tabloid talk shows and pushes one notch further, turning humiliation from mere confessional to actual competition. And now talk show producers are returning the favor, borrowing from game shows, ending their chat sessions with clear winners and losers.

On "Forgive or Forget," which appears locally on Channel 50, a guest spends her segment telling all about her misdeeds and asking a friend orrelative for forgiveness. At the moment of decision, she stands in front of a big wooden door, which swings open to melodramatic music. Behind the door stands either the person to whom the guest has apologized, now ready to forgive and hug, or nothing — a major-league dis. You can almost feel the cold breeze.

Beverly, the communications professor, says humiliation TV reflects a disturbing reality. "They're going after a demographic whose humor today is built on the insult, whose overall respect for other human beings — authority figures or just the common man — has just sadly declined," he says. "People cannot interact with each other on those shows without having some degree of emotional humiliation."

On some programs, that humiliation comes courtesy of condescending emcees. On "Win Ben Stein's Money" on Comedy Central, the concept is that the host is smarter than the contestants, and his sidekick's only apparent purpose is making snide comments. On GSN's new "Inquizition," pity the soul who answers wrong and gets called "mentally challenged" by the host.

On other programs, the host just sits back and lets the guests zing one another, as on "Change of Heart." In a recent episode, Jerry complained that EdieMay curses like a sailor and is unpredictable. ("I don't know who I'm waking up to," he said. "Broomhilda or EdieMay.") EdieMay said Jerry is cheap, among other things.

As EdieMay talked about her date with Tremell — how they took their shoes off on the sand, scrunched into a photo booth, ate lobster — Jerry sat forward with his hands on his knees, his mouth fixed in a stunned, angry O.

"It was like 'How Stella Got Her Groove Back,' " she said.

"I didn't know Stella lost her groove," Jerry said.

EdieMay's mouth formed her own stunned O when Grace told of how Jerry took her to the fire station where he worked. Grace boasted that she grabbed Jerry's knee at dinner and that he fell asleep in her apartment.

"I'm not cool with that," EdieMay said.

The jealousy was painful. The chemistry between the new pairings was, well, chemical. The outcome seemed easily predictable.

But then Jerry and EdieMay each flipped their cards: Stay Together.

Huh?

Both said going out on dates made them want to "work it out." Forget that they just spent a half-hour on national TV with their arms — and practically their legs — around other people. They want to work it out! They hug and coo; the audience whoops. We have two winners!

Winners?

In the new breed of show, you can never quite tell.