Surviving a fake Japanese game show

W. David Marx has written a great review of ABC’s I Survived A Japanese Game Show:

Let’s say an enterprising Romanian television network wanted to make a “reality show” in the American mold. For authenticity’s sake, Executive Producer Bogoescu and his team travel to the United States, where they work with a few lower-level TV hands. Although they base the central concept on ideas gleaned from American TV, their production ultimately aims to exaggerate the “reality show” experience to the point of absurd parody, where half the appeal is poking fun at the “conventions” of American TV and the other half is “playing around” within someone else’s television morality. I mean, Romanian networks would never do such terrible things to their cast members. To reinforce the “otherness” of the material, every backdrop of the Romanian show would be made up of Stars-and-Stripes and a rousing Sousa march would provide the opening theme. The audience would have Uncle Sam stovepipe hats and fake guns to shoot in the air. With no real American celebrities willing to host such a two-bit fiasco, the production team would have to bring in a few Romanian-American ringers to act like “real American hosts.” The final product — American Reality Show: I Want to Learn to Torture Terror Suspects and Eat Big Steaks — would retain some elements of North American reality shows, but would be, honestly speaking, a completely Romanian creation.

This “hypothetical situation” is not some strange post-Borat fantasy: this completely explains what American TV network ABC did to make its new reality/game show I Survived a Japanese Game Show…

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If you’re interested in watching it, the first episode of I Survived A Japanese Game Show can be viewed online at ABC.com (American IP addresses only).