Daunting challenges in new TV game show

EDU Manzano cohosts “Game & Go” with Joey de Leon

RECENTLY, we caught several telecasts of the new TV5 Sunday game show, “Game & Go,” and found it more perplexing than entertaining. The over-all impression the show made on us was that it was a compendium of generally outrageous challenges that sometimes tested its contestants’ physical abilities to the extreme.

One game had contestants trying to make ping pong balls fly by blowing them away—while being severely constrained by a facial contraption that made it virtually impossible for them to do so.

Further “entertainment” value was provided by the fact that the stocking mask distorted their facial features something awful, so they looked like pathetic caricatures.

Plastic ‘wall’

Another test required them to break through a sheet-plastic “wall,” which was so strong that it resisted their best efforts to succeed!

Later, non-celebrity contestants played the “True and Fall” game, which was weird, because the players had to choose one of three circles to stand on, without having the faintest notion why they were doing so.

It turned out that they would be asked a question with one right answer and two wrong ones—and the contestants who chose the wrong circles to stand on—would fall to a pit below!

We’ve seen a version of this “game” played on Ellen Degeneres’ TV show and found it funny there, because the players could save themselves by coming up with the correct answer. In “Game & Go’s” baliktad version, however, it’s all a matter of luck, so the fun factor isn’t there.

In fact, some of the players looked downright terrified as they hoped that the circle they were standing on wouldn’t open up through no fault of their own, just due to their terribly bad luck.

Instructions

Toward the end of another telecast, a game was played in an “earthquake” room that shook as two sets of players were tasked to play a scene that required them to follow a series of “funny” instructions designed for them to take pratfalls all over the constantly shaking set.

To add to the game’s “fun” factor, most of the contestants were stunningly ugly (and gay). It goes without saying that all of the players’ frantic efforts to be funny while retaining their balance turned out to be irrelevant, because the key winning element was the “ugly” factor, so the least lovely contestant (by far) won the sole judge’s nod—hands down!

What are we to make of this ungainly mix of games and features? That the show will do anything to make viewers laugh. That it has a sometimes sadistic “get the contestants” mentality that subjects its players to difficult physical tests that make them suffer. That the harshness or weirdness of some of those tests makes them not very funny to watch.

“Game & Go”? Uh, gotta go.