Viewpoints

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

Early one recent morning, two groups of women clad in nightgowns could be glimpsed on New York television madly wheeling two brass bedsteads up and down a sun-drenched parking lot, squealing and squawking, while a well-dressed humanoid alternately shouted encouragement and insults from the sidelines.

Public Broadcasting starting its day with an old absurdist film from Roman Polanski's student days? No, just the game-show people beginning theirs with Truth or Consequences, the first of no fewer than 25 half-hours of vapid-fire questions and gaudy prizes. On through the day come a succession of dazzle-dentured, sharp-suited emcees, attempting to smother their contempt for their work and their contestants under a line of chatter as false as a roofing salesman's guarantees.

The networks alone provide 18 of these programs, syndicators the rest. On WNBC-TV in New York, you can see nine game shows in a row. Seven of the top 15 daytime productions nationally are quizzes of one sort or other.

Under Pressure. An attempt to analyze the upsurge in popularity of the one television form for which no one but a network vice president has a kind word would defy the best minds in sociology. However, man's need to prove himself superior to his peers probably has something to do with it. Any bright preadolescent can answer most of the questions--High Rollers recently required a contestant to give the location of the Boston Tea Party--in the privacy of home, away from the pressure of the studio. The fantasy that one could do well up there if he (or she) just had the price of a ticket to New York or Los Angeles must spring eternal.

So do greedy thoughts, especially in an inflationary economy where everyone could use a few thousand dollars to clean up the bills or buy a matched set of motorbikes to get away from it all. If cash is the object, New York is the place for the potential contestant to head. Los Angeles, on the other hand, is into merchandise. Indeed, regionalism appears to account for the major differences in format between the shows.

Besides stressing money, New York-based games, like Winning Streak or The $10,000 Pyramid, tend to resemble life in the city itself. They reward the ability to stand up under pressure --from the clock, from the fear of losing winnings accumulated in earlier rounds of competition. On the whole, they are more sedentary, rely less on flashy stagecraft for their appeal than the Los Angeles games.

The latter particularly reflect the influence of nearby Las Vegas. The Joker's Wild offers giant slot machines that inform players of their question categories and winnings. Gambit is a variation on blackjack, while High Rollers is essentially a dice game with questions worked in. There are more celebrities --and more well known--on the L.A. shows. A huge pool of talent whose prime-time series have been canceled are glad to pick up this bargain-basement work. The computerlike electronics of the score-keeping on these shows is probably a fallout from the region's interest in space-age technology. The emphasis on rewarding winners with the materiel of the good life--patio furniture, camping equipment and cars, cars, cars --suits the fabled Southern California lifestyle. It would never occur to a Manhattan-based producer that such stuff could be thought of as a necessity, not a nuisance.

Objectionable as the game glut is as a phenomenon, there are a few bright --or at least less dim--spots on the schedule. The new Bill Cullen show, Winning Streak, is a kind of beardless Scrabble that becomes brain-busting when contestants try to make words of more than five letters with thousands of dollars in earlier winnings on the line. Split Second requires three participants to answer hard three-part questions. Concentration calls for the ability to do just that. The idea is to remember the prizes hidden behind numbers and match two of them to win the object. Split Second offers a nicely sadistic bonus to the day's big winner. He gets to select a car from among five beauties, but may keep it only if he picks one whose motor is set to start.

The long-running Jeopardy!, which requires contestants to supply the questions to tough answers, is marred mainly by Host Art Fleming's incessant administration of extreme unctiousness. Match Game 74, daytime's top-rated show, has hokey-jokey questions (What did the cannibal say when he finished off Euell Gibbons?) but is graced by the relaxed presence of Gene Rayburn, the most palatable of the hosts.

Generally, however, a day with the games is an anxious, sweaty thing--like the fever dream of a dull-witted materialist. As an experience, it is far less resonant than watching those former targets of cheap-shot cultural critics, the soap operas. At least the soaps deal with a few emotions other than greed. The quiz shows, one cannot help concluding, are just one more thing from which the American woman deserves to be liberated.

qed Ricahrd Schickel

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.