TV Review: I Survived a Japanese Game Show
Bottom Line: The title clearly doesn’t refer to the audience.
Jun 25, 2008
Airdate: 9-10 p.m. Tuesday, June 24 (ABC)
With ABC’s “I Survived a Japanese Game Show,” we get the equivalent of a 45-second YouTube video stretched to an hour, week after painful week.
It’s rather like a “Saturday Night Live” skit that should have stayed a skit and not wound up on the big screen (“It’s Pat! -- The Movie”). There’s a reason that idiotic, humiliating games that transform people into human fertilizer are a staple of TV in Japan and not the U.S. In their game shows, the Japanese have elevated cruelty to an art form. The idea that we’d sit at our computer monitors and guffaw at the culturally befuddling absurdity that goes along with being a Japanese contestant is one thing, but to think it would cross over to American TV takes the joke a surrealistic step too far. We’re left scrambling for our mouse and the left-click button, only to realize to our horror that we’ve once again been full-on invaded by Japan.
That said, it really is funny to watch this show for about five minutes. It starts off with a game in which Americans are made to eat off of a plate attached to the head of a teammate running on a treadmill. Based loosely on a concept imported by executive producer Tim Crescenti from Denmark, the idea here involves whisking 10 unwitting Americans to Japan to compete before a live audience and a cloying, jeering Japanese host, Rome Kanda. It’s a reality show-within-a-game show, with the winner taking home $250,000 and the glory of being made a laughingstock before the citizenry of two nations.
If this were consistently funny or remotely interesting, we could of course forgive the fact that “Japanese Game Show” bisects the Seventh Circle of Hell. But instead, it’s just the same dopey, preening, hallucinatory vibe over and over. The zany challenges -- people smashing eggs with their butt wearing a chicken suit or covering themselves in flour in myriad ways -- pile up to the point where we’re literally screaming for this visual assault to stop.
Production: Greengrass Prods. Host: Tony Sano. Executive producers: Arthur Smith, Kent Weed, David Sidebotham, Karsten Bartholin, Tim Crescenti. Producer: Oscar Beltran.