Game of the Week: America Says

 

AMERICA SAYS is a TV game show specifically created for the cable station Game Show Network (on Channel 73 for Gainesville Cox Cable subscribers).  It's been around since 2018 and is hosted by John Michael Higgins.  The premise is simple enough: two four-person teams...not necessarily family like the similar show Family Feud...vie against each other for points and bonus round dollars as they fill in the blanks to phrases posed at-large in surveys taken of Americans for their most common answers.  You can see from the above game, with the contestant in the lower left corner, that "home run", "umpire", and "strike" have already been correctly guessed for those blanks on the puzzle screen...the remaining words are hinted at by the lengths of their blanks.  This is not a deliberately racy show with all kinds of dubious sexual references as is sadly the case with Steve Harvey's Family Feud, which I used to watch in the 1970s when Richard Dawson hosted it but now studiously avoid...I like Harvey and thinks he's a talented comedian, but his show has gone in the wrong direction with its emphasis.  On the other hand, I have yet to figure out the somewhat confusing rules on America Says, especially when it comes to team elimination and bonus rounds.  And like just about every game show out there, they spend too much time trying to establish personal rapport with the often very uninteresting guests by asking questions prompted, no doubt, by the questionnaires they filled out beforehand...groan.  No, I can do without all that: what I like is simply competing against the contestants to see if I can't fill in all the blanks.  Another thing making America Says superior to Family Feud is that the puzzle survey is not of the studio audience, with potentially oddball responses, but rather is more likely to be representative of how people really think.  On the other hand, I do like that Family Feud bonus round more...just let me skip the rest of the show.  When I see America Says with all its surveys about often inane topics, it gives me pause as to why there isn't a news cable channel somewhere out there whose only function is to poll the population with pertinent questions about relevant issues affecting Americans today, without any built-in ideological spin...kind of like a Gallop or Harris Poll Channel.  Such a channel would demand a response from our often intransigent politicians when their votes and policies directly contradict the people's will.  But I get it: fat chance of that ever happening...instead we get partisan, biased news channels with their partisan, biased viewership participating in meaningless surveys...