Family Feud Can Fix America

In a recent discussion, Sherry Kappel prefaced her comments about Game of Thrones, which she has never watched, with the following flourish of expert “cred”:

Lest you debate whether I am qualified to respond, I have it on good authority from many recipe sites that one can rate and talk about a recipe after the reviewer has replaced every single ingredient and a few of the instructions.

I reprint Sherry’s comment here because on Medium comments are deprecated and can be very hard to find. By having it appear in this un-curated story, Sherry will have the satisfaction of knowing that six people may see her genius… 7 in the unlikely event that my brother checks his Twitter feed.

The point is, we don’t need to know anything to write about it on Medium. You and I are talking over the fence here. We are on a set of virtual bar stools. If you want me to preface everything I say with my family’s boilerplate prologue, “It might have happened and it could be true,” I’ll do that, but I don’t think it should be necessary.

Nobody should mistake most of the posts on Medium with academic proceedings, despite Medium’s explicit desire to raise the bar of “information quality” on the site. We, the creative underclass — the low-oxygen breathers living out our existence in the mud of Medium backwaters — don’t care so much about “expertism”. The world is awash in experts. Look where it has got us.

You and me, we are here just to take the air and shoot the breeze, aren’t we? If someone’s exaggerations are entertaining, we may indulge them. You don’t interrupt Rabelais in mid-story to tell him that it is silly to think Gargantua can piss a river. If someone is too full of nonsense, or themselves, we may shout them down. We can hiss charlatans out of the opera house. It’s been done before.

My Television Watching Habits

I say all this because this is a post about television and I don’t know much about television. I don’t know much about television because I don’t live in California. In California, they take television very seriously. I know this because Lon Shapiro, our resident Californian, wrote the following article about the Game of Thrones finale:

That post proves Californians = Knowledge about how shows are supposed to work. I’m adding it to my “knowledge of California” file for the much anticipated “Let’s Make Fun of a State: California” post. I have some other good tidbits like, “Californians believe that their soul resides in the glovebox of their car” and “In California they use wine glasses the size of their head.” Maybe we should get back to television.

I often say, “I don’t watch a lot of television”, just like I often say “I don’t eat a lot of carbs” while eating a bowl of cereal. I watched Game of Thrones, I binge watched “Ertugrull Resurrection”, and I watch a lot of sports. I have cut out most news and replaced it with game shows. I watch Jeopardy! almost every night. I also watch Family Feud.

Family Feud is a really weird and wonderful show. The charm of its current incarnation in inextricably wrapped around a cheesy core of Steve Harvey’s shtick. It’s an acquired taste, like grapefruit juice or ketamine. You have to “dumb down” to enjoy it. Did I mention that I smoke pot?

One of the beautiful things about Family Feud is that there are a lot of people of color on the show. There is incredible diversity among the families that play. If you watched only Family Feud you might think that something like 40% of the U.S. was black, Latinx, or Asian.

I honestly believe that if everyone watched Family Feud race relations in America would improve. Here’s why: you can’t be afraid of the “other” on Family Feud because everyone on Family Feud, regardless of race or ethnicity, is goofy as fuck. To be on Family Feud you have to be a grade-A goofball. Even when they have a white family from Alabama, they’re not scary. Their strong Southern accents aren’t saying things like “I want to climb in your womb and stop you from committing murder.” Instead they’re mouthing dumb crap like “Steve, I’m going to say ‘refrigerator magnet’” and then their whole family claps and shouts “good answer” even if it is the worst answer in the world.

Family Feud proves that there is no shortage of non-threatening cheeseballs from every demographic. It’s hard to maintain even an atom of dignity on the show. For one thing, contestants are expected to clap and dance to the show’s theme song, which can’t be done well.

You also have to run out on to the stage at the start the Fast Money segment. Even Snoop Dog can’t make it look cool.

My clickbait headline is that bad television can fix our nation. I really believe that. Why don’t we all just succumb to our inner dumbness? A common culture based on a goofy television game show full of bad sexual references and stupid answers. I don’t know. It seems like it might work.