ABC
101 WAYS TO LEAVE A GAME SHOW - "This Is the Craziest Thing I've Ever Done" - "There comes a point in your life where you pretty much have seen it all. Then one day you show up to work, and a grown man soils himself while wearing a full body leotard as he flies away from you wearing a jet pack. That's a good day!," says host Jeff Sutphen. Unbelievable eliminations await this week's players, as they fight for $50,000. Eight contestants must avoid a wrong answer that could get them eliminated in the wildest ways imaginable... by being rolled down a ravine inside the balls of doom, being launched off a cliff while inside the back of a pickup truck, tearing through a flaming wall, or being flown off a 300-foot canyon into the sunset attached to a jet pack. The final four contestants who survive will take on a face-first, ten-story drop atop The Tower for a chance to win the grand prize. "101 Ways to Leave a Game Show" airs TUESDAY, JULY 5 (9:00-10:00 p.m., ET) on the ABC Television Network. Jeff Sutphen (Nickelodeon's "Brain Surge") hosts. (ABC/MIKE WEAVER)
CONTESTANTS, JEFF SUTPHEN
Yesterday was the first day of summer, the longest, lightest day of the year, which made it the astronomically perfect day for ABC to premiere its companion piece to Wipeout, 101 Ways to Leave a Game Show.
The premise was simple: the host asked a group of contestants challenging, multiple-choice questions about—I don’t know, facts and stuff, was anyone really paying attention to that part?—and the unfortunates who answered wrong were ejected. Literally. Into the air, off the side of a moving vehicle, &c.
There may be some greater social layer of import to be revealed here, about how all this reflects the nervous, tenuous state of workers in our fragile economy, but I’m not going to make it. What it definitely was, was the definition of summer TV: big, easy and fun-violent.
Comments on this—or the debut of ABC’s middling Afghanistan-war import Combat Hospital—welcome below. There are no wrong answers. But your computer may explode anyway.
