Tuned In

The Morning After: They Blowed Up Real Good

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ABC

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.