Both Grey’s Anatomy and CSI were repeats last night, so I decided to give the new FOX game show Are You Smarter Than a 5th Grader? a try. I thought the premise of the show was pretty interesting: contestants have to try to answer questions that appear in elementary school textbooks. The subjects are things like grammar, science, health, U.S. history, and geography.
Going in, I knew that the contestants on this show wouldn’t exactly be Jeopardy! caliber, but I was still surprised at how bad they were. The first one up, a phone salesman named Larry, required help on 3 out of the first 5 questions he faced. He ended up winning $100,000 before he walked away, but still… he was pretty brutal up there. Did you hear how he tried to define “suffix”? Yikes.
The second contestant wasn’t much better, what with the way she babbled on about polar bears and grizzly bears. But like I said, I wasn’t expecting the contestants on a show like this to be brainiacs.
Overall, I didn’t like the show very much. I thought the pace was waaay to slow. It takes several minutes to get through each question, and the host, Jeff Foxworthy, does a horrible job of trying to build up suspense once the contestant has answered. I didn’t like the classmate/kids portion of the show either. I thought it had a very fake feel to it, as though it were totally staged or something.
There were too many negatives with this show, and even though it was only an hour long, it totally dragged for me. As I mentioned above, I think the concept is intriguing, but the execution is way off. I won’t be tuning in again.