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Trivial Pursuit

by MOLLY O'BRIEN

I recently sat down and viewed the final three nights of The Million Second Quiz, an NBC game show endeavor that took place over ten nights and involved a complex web of rules. Contestants sat in an outdoor "money chair" near the Lincoln Tunnel, racking up winnings as challengers attempted to unseat them. Audience members could play along with an official app, and if they got enough points playing the virtual game, they could "line jump," skipping the show's tryouts and heading straight onto the in-person show in New York.

There were other regulations involved but they were so baroque that I could drink a single glass of wine (Château Diana, $6.99 at Duane Reade, really more of a bottle of tangy juice than anything else) and the rules were gone from my mind forever.

Quiz was the live television blur that I'm sure we're all accustomed to now. Dramatic music. Repeated claims that this was the most revolutionary television show to exist, ever. You could play from home. You could watch the action 23 hours a day online. Ryan Seacrest hosted, of course. Paul Telegdy, NBC's president of reality and late-night programming, described the voyeuristic nature of Quiz as "Orwellian," as if that were a desirable thing. According to celebritynetworth.com, Ryan Seacrest has amassed 240 million dollars, much of it from exhorting audience members to get excited about things. He is a professional exhorter.

Million Second Quiz was, of course, not very good. It was a live, boring failure. Its app crashed the first night, its rules were too confusing. One NBC exec admitted to not understanding how to play. Contestants appeared anxiously blank or under the influence of benzodiazepenes. The questions themselves were horrifying, an E! network Trivial Pursuit. One question was about what kind of accessory a “Birkin” was; the money-seat contestant confidently answered that it was a kind of open-toed sandal, and looked weirdly nonplussed when it was announced that he was wrong.

Basically, the show made me nostalgic for another game show: Who Wants To Be A Millionaire? That show was, for a short period of time in 1999 and 2000, my earth, moon and stars. Maybe I loved it so much because I was nine and didn't know any better. Maybe I loved it because it was on five nights a week, my second tier babysitter; if omnipresence makes something Orwellian, then Regis Philbin was the best Big Brother a girl could ever ask for.

Would I hate Millionaire if I watched it now? Would I hate it the way I hated the cheesy, Minority Report, glass-and-neon-digital-numbers aesthetic of Million Second Quiz? I don't know. Sure, my taste hadn't evolved, but I think I loved Millionaire at the time not for the decor and the cheesy sweeping music and the way the lights dimmed at the beginning of each new question, but because I knew that everyone else was watching it. It was absolutely crushing the ratings. It was getting 30 million viewers a night. Those numbers are insane now. Quiz could barely break five million.

Maybe I hated Million Second Quiz because I somehow knew that no one was watching, even before looking up the ratings. I could sense that it was abandoned. The exhorting was for naught.

Before it was over, I tried ‘playing along’ on the app game. It’d be unfair to judge the show without testing out their full immersion tactic, right? The questions tread usual early-round territory: well-known paintings, well-known musicians, well-known puns. I totally trounced my competitor, an avatar named JasonK. I really just handed him his ass. And there was no glory in it. No glory in the same way there’s no glory in saying something mean about someone on Reddit or in the YouTube comments. There was no human connection, and no stern moderator, no Regis to ask me if my answer was final. On Millionaire, Regis was gravity. Regis was finality. Regis was Knowledge Personified. A lack of Regis meant the stakes were nonexistent.

And there was no glory because JasonK and I were two schmos in a sea of schmos watching and doing better things than us. JasonK and I were doing this Regis-less thing that NBC told us was super-radical and revolutionary, even though all the apps and the real-time livestreaming and the miles and miles of Seacrest smiles didn’t make up for the fact that giving a shit about primetime network game shows is not something that 30 million people do anymore. JasonK and I were alone. The winner got $2.6 million. What is the name of Kim Kardashian’s cat?

Molly O'Brien is the senior contributor to This Recording. She is a writer living in Brooklyn. She tumbls here. She last wrote in these pages about The Bling Ring. You can find an archive of her writing on This Recording here.

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