“Without Prejudice?”

This looked pretty interesting to me:

Me, Prejudiced? A Game Show Plays Jury

By Mike Hale

Published: July 17, 2007

Twenty-five thousand dollars? As the prize for a new 90-minute game show-reality contest? It seems like a paltry amount, even less than you can win on a charming anachronism like “Jeopardy.” These days, who wants to be anything short of a millionaire?

But $25,000 is the amount at stake in each episode of “Without Prejudice” on the Game Show Network, and it makes sense, because the prize isn’t the point. Having learned something from “American Idol,” another game show that originated in Britain, “Without Prejudice” shifts its focus almost entirely away from the contestants and puts it squarely on the judges.

The premise: five people, sequestered in the proverbial green room, reveal tidbits about themselves — their jobs, their beliefs, their love lives — to another five people, who sit in judgment of them along with the show’s host, the psychotherapist Robi Ludwig. All 10 are “ordinary” — no celebrities in sight — though since we’re told nothing about how either group is selected, we can assume that the usual reality-show casting decisions are being made. That would explain the contestant in tonight’s pilot who first admits to being a marine and later adds that he’s now an “adult-film” star.

The wrinkle, such as it is: The contestants don’t have to do anything but be themselves (or whatever version of themselves they’re willing to project on television). It’s up to the panelists to vote them off gradually and eventually pick a winner of that $25,000 check, based solely on their appearances and their answers to questions from the producers and the panel. (The two finalists meet their judges face to face.)

We watch the questioning, and we watch the panelists’ deliberations (guided by Ms. Ludwig), which, in the absence of much solid information about the contestants, are meant to lean heavily on the prejudices the judges bring with them (hence the ironic title).

It’s a bit like “The View” and a bit like “Survivor” — a 90-minute tribal council, on a cheap game show set instead of a romantically tiki-torched beach.

GSN, as the network prefers to be called, has been flogging the show as “controversial and provocative,” and the first episode tries to earn those labels right away: within minutes, one panelist has announced his dislike for a contestant simply because he’s black and, well, the panelist just doesn’t like black people. When is the last time you heard that in public, let alone on television? (From a noncelebrity, that is.) The panelist may indeed be racist, but his declaration of it just plays like a bid for attention.

Tonight’s episode calms down after that, though there’s a bit of a kerfuffle over feelings about gun control, and one panelist can’t stop speculating about which of the contestants might be gay. When it’s all said and done, the final decision appears to have less to do with the contestants’ lives and beliefs than with their Q factors: The winner is the most likable of the five, with the best smile.

Despite its “Weakest Link” music and its structural resemblance to contests like “Survivor,” “Without Prejudice” kept reminding me of an entirely different show: “The Real World,” the original purveyor of rambling all-night conversations about race and sex. The difference with “The Real World” cast members — beyond the fact that they’re often drunk, which gives them a degree of deniability — is that we get to know them, sometimes much better than we’d care to, and eventually we can judge when they’re telling the truth.

On “Without Prejudice,” while we’re told little about the contestants, we’re told even less about the panelists (in the pilot, at least). The entertainment is supposed to come from watching the panelists expose their hidden biases, but it’s hard to care if you don’t know anything about them, and it’s impossible to judge their real feelings.

When it comes down to tonight’s final elimination, each panelist has a reason for his or her choice, but — without giving too much away — it seemed likely that they voted the way they did simply because they were afraid of appearing racist.

We’ve all been in a place like this, where people we didn’t know made judgments and said stupid things about us based on nothing beyond our appearance and our way of speaking. It was called high school, and do we really need to go back?

Source: The New York Times

Watch the video here.