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    Win a game show, become a US citizen? We’ve entered the realm of the truly depraved | Dave Schilling

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    I guess Republicans really love game shows. Just a few days after Fox aired its “isn’t Trump wild” guessing game, What Did I Miss, it was revealed that the TV producer Rob Worsoff has pitched the United States Department of Homeland Security on a series premise he calls The American, which would give immigrants a chance to compete in a series of challenges for the prize of US citizenship. The actual process of winning citizenship is obviously too boring to film. Filling out an N-400 form? Snore. A written exam? I’d rather watch a dog eat grass. Skip all that and give us an obstacle course instead.People have stupid ideas all the time. My child thought it would be fun to squeeze lemon juice in his hot chocolate. He took one sip, almost barfed on the table, then begged me to order him another, lemon-less beverage. Stupid ideas are great, because most of them are harmless. “Oh, I ate a large bug off the ground. Whoops.” The only stupid ideas that are a problem are the ones where the actual government considers cosigning them. The DHS assistant secretary Tricia McLaughlin was asked by Time magazine what the status of Worsoff’s pitch was and responded via email that it “has not received approval or rejection by staff”.Gotta really think this one through, I guess. Something like this must be thoroughly vetted by serious people. How cruel is this one, exactly? How desirable is the bloodthirsty demo for advertisers these days? Can we sell a presenting sponsorship? And is this for streaming or broadcast? Can we get Chris Hardwick to host? These are all vital questions to consider before making a decision in show business.Such an idea would be eye-rollingly low-class in normal times, but as the Trump administration attempts to ramp up deportations and to do away with the constitutional right of citizenship by birth (and federal courts bravely fight back), this dumb concept travels at warp speed to the dimension of the truly depraved. The US Citizenship and Immigration Services website takes great pains to describe the process of becoming an American as solemn and full of responsibility. Step 10 of the site’s “10 Steps to Naturalization” is “Understanding U.S. Citizenship”. It states: “Citizenship is the common thread that connects all Americans. Check out this list of some of the most important rights and responsibilities that all citizens – both Americans by birth and by choice – should exercise, honor, and respect.”Yes, but what if you had to guess the number of jelly beans in a jar first?To make his pitch even more appealing to the bigwigs in Washington, Worsoff suggested a few choice ideas for challenges that correspond to the most stereotypical aspects of life in America’s 50 states. A pizza-making contest for New York, a rocket-launching challenge for Florida, and a “gold rush challenge” for California. Nothing says “vital skills for living in 2025” like panning for gold in a pair of tattered Levi’s 501s. Perhaps Levi’s will sponsor the segment. Gosh, this thing pays for itself.But why stop there? Maybe a Breaking Bad-themed meth-making challenge for New Mexico. Polygamy challenge for Utah? How efficiently can you operate a turn-of-the-20th-century steel mill in Pennsylvania? Can you safely land a plane at Newark airport? For Washington state, you just have to answer trivia questions about Seattle inaccuracies in the sitcom Frasier. The possibilities for inanity are significant.In order to advance to the next round of this bottomless pit of human misery, contestants would be subjected to a vote, which Worsoff described as “like a presidential election”. Oh, how fun. Can you contest the results of that vote, too? Worsoff said in an CNN interview that his idea is “not like the Hunger Games”. Mostly because the costume budget isn’t as high.The Democratic opposition in Congress has, naturally, lined up to publicly condemn such a grotesque notion. The New York congressman Jerry Nadler said on X (formerly known as a useful platform for conversation) that “human lives are not game show props.”A nice sentiment, but I must be the bearer of bad news. Human lives have been game show props since the invention of the form. In 2005, Fox (why is it always Fox?) aired a reality show called Who’s Your Daddy, where a woman had to guess which of eight men was her real father. If she guessed correctly, she’d win both an awkward conversation and $100,000. Presumably the cash prize would go directly to her therapy bills. Bravo’s Real Housewives franchise, while not a game show (the real winners are the viewers, I suppose) is a reality universe where women frequently abuse alcohol to the detriment of their own lives and the lives of others around them. If human lives are not props in these shows, are they even entertaining to the masses?An idea like The American, then, is the natural extension of the genre, taking someone’s desperation, fear, and overwhelming desire and squeezing all the drama possible out of it. Worsoff told CNN that he had pitched this idea to previous Democratic administrations, but weirdly, we never heard about it back then. It’s only now that such a concept feels enough in line with the zeitgeist of immigration paranoia that Worsoff felt emboldened to speak freely about it.He said: “I’m putting a face to immigration. This is a great celebration of America.” Yes, it is a celebration of America. Specifically our worst impulses: the desire to make everything a game and revel in the bread-and-circuses spectacle of life and death, but to cloak it in nobility and charity. Worsoff continued: “I’m very fortunate and lucky and honored to be an American. And I want everybody to understand the process.”At no point did I think that a pizza-making contest was part of the process.

    Dave Schilling is a Los Angeles-based writer and humorist More

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      in US Politics

      Fox’s new game show makes people guess what Trump’s been up to. Somehow I can’t see the joy in that | Dave Schilling

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      The classic television gameshow is one of the simplest pleasures available to the sedentary, socially maladjusted people we used to call “couch potatoes”. An average Joe is required to perform a task – ranging from answering a trivia question or spinning a large, colorful wheel to keeping a hand on a Toyota Land Cruiser for as long as possible – in exchange for the possibility of winning a cash prize (or a truck). For the viewer, there is the satisfaction of believing, perhaps falsely, that you could win the prize if you were in the contestant’s place. Maybe you identify with that contestant and actively root for their success. Or perhaps you just want to see some poor bastard shot out of a cannon, like on TBS’s dearly departed series Wipeout. Whatever your pleasure might be, it’s not an uncommon or esoteric one.We watch gameshows because they are basic human drama distilled into an easily repeatable format. TV development executives have tried to modernize it with the fancy graphics of something like NBC’s The Wall or the gratuitous flesh-baring of the 2000s disasterpiece Are You Hot, in which a panel of “celebrity” judges such as Lorenzo Lamas critiqued people on the number of visible abs on their bodies. The simpler a gameshow premise – guessing the cost of basic household items, answering multiple choice questions in a spooky room, or doing menial tasks for a man who combs his hair forward – the better. Perhaps this is why my initial reaction to the press release for the forthcoming mini-series Greg Gutfeld’s What Did I Miss?, on the Fox Nation streaming service, was so immediately negative.In the new series, Gutfeld (who made an entire career out of sporting a perpetually self-satisfied smirk that turns liberals into feral animals running around in circles and urinating on the floor) quizzes contestants on the headlines. The unusual part: these contestants have been sequestered in upstate New York for three months, “with no contact to the outside world – no phones, internet, television, or social media” – not unlike the short-lived BBC series The Bubble. Some of the headlines Gutfeld offers are real. Some are fabricated. It is up to the sad group of media-starved test subjects to ferret out what’s real from what isn’t.Imagine, a blissful 90 days of not knowing what is happening outside your window. A three-month vacation of regular meals, uninterrupted sleep and zero temptation to spend hours scrolling TikTok for videos of people marinating chicken in NyQuil. Doesn’t that sound lovely? Jared Leto spent 12 days in blissful meditative isolation at the start of the Covid pandemic and when he came back into civilization, someone had to tell him he couldn’t eat inside at Nobu any more. I feel bad for the guy, but he probably reminisces about those 12 days constantly.The blessed contestants of What Did I Miss? were afforded not just 12 days of peace, but 90 of them. That’s almost eight times what Jared Leto got! And on the other side, there’s the chance to win $50,000. Hopefully the inflation rate doesn’t spike again and that money keeps its value. They’re gonna need it when they hear about those tariffs.I suppose What Did I Miss? is more of a stunt than a traditional gameshow premise. Something closer to Joe Millionaire, a dating show where women vie for the attention of a man they think is rich but is actually not. How many times can you do something like that before the novelty wears off? You can only sequester so many people for three months before it starts to feel even cheaper than it is.Of course, beyond the show being crass, it trivializes everything in our current moment of social upheaval and angst. “Isn’t that Donald Trump a wacky guy? He’s so wild, you’ll never guess the nutso stuff he got up to last week!” Being that this is a Fox Nation production starring Fox News’s favorite bobblehead doll, it stands to reason that the audience for the show is people who still find something funny about news headlines. We are far beyond the days when someone could riff for hours on the image of George HW Bush puking on the prime minister of Japan. That was, in fact, quite amusing. I mean, man, just look at him hurl! That’s something else, isn’t it, folks?Donald Trump has yet to vomit on a world leader, but we can certainly say he has soiled the basic functions of democracy. This is not speculating on what your crazy uncle got up to after he raided the liquor cabinet. Are these contestants expected to suss out the fake headline from choices like “sent an innocent man to a supermax prison that looks like it was ripped off from Judge Dredd comics” or “threatened to tank the world economy just to see what would happen”? Call me a stick-in-the-mud if you like, but I’m just not seeing the breezy joy of the standard gameshow in a series in which people must guess whose human rights have been denied and why.The Fox Nation president, Lauren Petterson, said in the press release: “Truth can be stranger than fiction and who better to help isolated Americans catch up on the headlines they missed during an unprecedented news cycle than Greg Gutfeld.” The word I’m thinking of for all of this is not “strange”. “Grim”? Yes. “Dispiriting”? Sure. “Morally reprehensible”? Bingo.Instead of calling what we are witnessing a series of preventable calamities, we refer to it as a “news cycle”. Life is reduced to the whims of the media machine. It is, itself, a gameshow played for big money, where the object is to do or say the worst thing possible so people pay attention to you. That seems like the aim of the entire endeavor – to use cheeky TV smarm to make all of this palatable. It flattens that which we should be outraged about into a sickly sweet pancake of gameshow pablum. I hope the winner of this farce refuses the money in exchange for being sent back to the little house in upstate New York, free of the knowledge that human suffering is now government policy.

      Dave Schilling is a Los Angeles-based writer and humorist More

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      in Elections

      Pat Sajak Bids Farewell to ‘Wheel of Fortune’: ‘The Time Has Come to Say Goodbye’

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      The host thanked the show’s viewers and had special words for his co-star, Vanna White, before he signed off for the final time.On Friday night, Pat Sajak said goodbye to “Wheel of Fortune,” expressing gratitude to the countless viewers who had tuned in during his more than 40 years at the helm. “Thank you for allowing me into your lives,” he said.After the final game on his watch concluded, Sajak returned from a final commercial break and addressed the camera directly. “Well, the time has come to say goodbye,” he said. “It’s been an incredible privilege to be invited into millions of homes night after night, year after year, decade after decade. I always felt that the privilege came with the responsibility to keep this daily half-hour a safe place for family fun. No social issues, no politics, nothing embarrassing I hope, just a game.”Still, Sajak, who began his run in 1981, acknowledged that “Wheel of Fortune” had evolved into more than just frivolous, fleeting fun for many. “It became,” he said, “a place where kids learned their letters, where people from other countries honed their English skills, where families came together along with friends and neighbors, and entire generations.”He praised the show’s crew and thanked his family, including his daughter Maggie, who joined “Wheel” as a social correspondent in 2021. And he of course had many kind words for his co-star of more than four decades, Vanna White, whom he called his “professional other half.” (The farewell episode was filmed in early April.)“Like me, she takes the show very seriously but not herself,” Sajak said. “I shudder to think what these 40-plus years might have been like had they brought someone in all full of themselves, playing the prima donna role. Vanna is as sweet and unassuming as she seems.” (He noted that while he’ll miss seeing her at work, they’ll see plenty of each other: They live about five miles apart.) They embraced onstage after his remarks as the episode ended like any other, with the two of them speaking to each other as the credits rolled.On Thursday night, it was White who, through tears, took a moment to address Sajak directly.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More