Few things on television could seem more pleasingly old-fashioned and simply entertaining than NBC’s “Hollywood Game Night,” which returned last week for a third, schedule-padding season.
The show, which airs at 9 p.m. on Tuesdays, gathers six different celebrities whose fame varies from the C+ list (Turtle from “Entourage;” what’s-his-name from “Grimm;” Penny from “The Big Bang Theory”) to the occasional B+/A- (Amy Poehler, John Legend) for a hip, loungey exercise in the time-honored tradition of watching our stars play a variety of clever party games that draw on our culture’s last remaining expertise: showbiz trivia.
But in a more dispiriting sense, “Hollywood Game Night” also serves as another reminder that we live in a sad, unimaginative era of acquiescence to celebrity status. Large swaths of network TV — from morning shows to late-night, from midday to afternoon to prime time — have been given over to constant, publicist-pleasing opportunities for stars to advance their own brands, unchallenged, and pass off their self-promotion as the very definition of fun. Celebrities no longer have to prove that they are talented; they mostly have to prove that they are always good company.
That’s why there are so many celebs falling over themselves for the opportunity to scream clues to the names of other, slightly more famous stars. And here the celebs are again, facing off in the ongoing, insipid “Lip Sync Battle” (currently airing on Spike), which first began as yet one more juvenile segment on “The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon,” where games-with-stars took precedence over conversation.
Here again are celebs in the deep woods, where they are seen “Running Wild With Bear Grylls” (returning at 9 p.m. Monday on NBC), eating bugs or rapelling down cliff faces in order to get in touch with some previously untapped, career-elevating sense of strength and stamina.
Change the channel and it’s still more celebs, submitting to explorations of their ancestral family trees on TLC’s “Who Do You Think You Are?” (returning July 26) or on PBS’ “Finding Your Roots.” As well-meaning as they might seem, these programs teach us a small amount of history and more about how to flatter a celebrity’s notions of genetic destiny.
Why celebrities?
Exalting and deferring to anyone remotely famous comes with a price, as PBS recently learned the hard way with movie star Ben Affleck on “Finding Your Roots.” In the course of filming, the show’s genealogy experts discovered a fact that Affleck didn’t feel like sharing with the public — that his great-great-great-grandfather on his mother’s side had been a Georgia slave owner. E-mails that surfaced in the notorious Sony hack last year appeared to show that Affleck had pressured the show’s producers and its star-professor host, Henry Louis Gates Jr., to leave out the slave-owning ancestor. The show agreed to bury it, eventually leading PBS to announce last month that it would postpone future episodes until it can be certain that a central integrity has been restored.
This leads to another, more difficult question: Why would the producers of “Finding Your Roots” (as well as a professor like Gates and a network like PBS) feel the need to build a show around celebrities in the first place? How is a star’s family tree any more interesting than anyone else’s family tree? Are we at the point where a series proposal can’t get a green light unless it’s about famous people?
On a larger point, when did we all start being so subservient to fame, rather than treat it warily and with skepticism, the way we sometimes used to do? Why does the world seem like one long round of “Hollywood Game Night”?
“You sheep would watch paint dry if it was called ‘Celebrity Paint Dry,’ ” Comedy Central’s Daniel Tosh said on a recent episode of “Tosh.0,” as he delivered a particularly disgusted rant against such programming. “I never appear on talk shows because I don’t want to pretend to enjoy goofing around with Jimmy Fallon.”
Shameless plugging
Depending on your age and nostalgia track, “Hollywood Game Night” can summon pleasant memories of days off from school in the 1960s and ’70s that were spent watching syndicated game shows (“The $25,000 Pyramid,” “Match Game” or “Hollywood Squares”) in which medium-famous celebs assisted everyday contestants in winning small fortunes, seemingly out of the goodness of their hearts and an opening in their schedules.
The casual celebrity appearance on quiz shows was, even then, nothing new. It was part of television’s earliest programming, a format inherited from the heyday of radio.
Far more physically intense was the occasional prime-time special known as “Battle of the Network Stars” (it ran on ABC from 1976 and sporadically into the 1980s), in which celebs were judged more on their athleticism than their wit and where tempers occasionally flared. Look back at clips and notice the freedom the stars had to be sweaty and loose, angry and momentarily upset, even limping in defeat and complaining about bad sportsmanship. It’s hard to imagine today’s stars being willing to risk injury to either their bodies or their images with something so raw and unrehearsed.
Then or now, nothing more easily and safely fulfills a celebrity’s need for good publicity than a safe, resolutely indoorsy show like “Hollywood Game Night.” Each team is captained by an attractive-enough “regular” person, who is playing to win cash for himself or herself, while the stars, of course, play for charities — always tied to an unobjectionable cause.
But what the stars really play for are those precious 20 or 30 seconds in which the show’s affable celeb host, Jane Lynch, chit-chats with them about their current show, album or movie. “Hollywood Game Night” exists primarily for the purpose of reminding you who they are — which is important, given the sheer number of people claiming to be famous. In the first episode it was a tad surreal to watch an out-of-character Jane Krakowski gamely plug her most recent show, Netflix’s “Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt,” in a process and setting that could so easily be lampooned on her last show, “30 Rock.”
Surrounded by all this constant kowtowing, it’s getting more difficult to discern the satirical from the sincere. I’m reminded of poor Victor Allan Miller, the desperate, aging actor played by Harry Shearer in the 2006 mockumentary “For Your Consideration,” who fruitlessly repeats the name of his fleetingly buzzworthy movie (“Home for Purim”) while being forced to dance with teenagers on an MTV hip-hop show.
As the show’s host (for which she won an Emmy last year), Jane Lynch admirably seems to cling to the faintest illusion of blasé cynicism for this kind of work; after all, she too had a part in “For Your Consideration,” playing a smarmy co-host of a nightly infotainment show. With each of her coy winks, Lynch’s presence on “Hollywood Game Night” makes it all seem less vacuous — but only slightly so.
“Hollywood Game Night” rather masterfully convinces the viewer that it’s an authentic exercise in friendship and bonhomie — theirs and yours.
These transactional appearances have never been more favorable to celebrities, who are more desperate to find safe spaces for fame maintenance.
Maybe that’s why they all want a seat on the fun bus.
Ask them to stand on their heads and they’ll stand on their heads. Anything to stay famous.
