Whose Faulty Vision

Idea File: New Game Show

I was half-watching an episode of Jeopardy the other night while I was writing some e-mails, and a couple of times I missed the name of the category and found myself trying to guess what it was based on the questions and answers. So I thought, hey, that would make kind of a cool game show.

Here’s how it would work. It would be more or less like Jeopardy, with maybe 5 different categories of question/answer pairs for players to choose from, only the categories wouldn’t be named–just category 1, 2 and so on. Players would have to answer the questions, but they’d also have to guess what the unifying theme of the category was, based on the questions and answers. Maybe they’d have a chance to guess the category after each correct answer, or maybe they’d have to buzz in separately for that, I don’t know.

The categories, like in Jeopardy, could be anything from subject matter-based (like “The 1700s” or “Tony Award Winners”) to wordplay (like “Homonyms for weather terms” or “One-letter answers”). Obviously it would be a challenge coming up with categories that were neither too easy nor too hard, but it’s certainly possible.

Wouldn’t that be fun? Pity that the only new game shows that have been coming out lately are built on the Millionaire model (only one contestant, one question every 5 minutes), which wouldn’t work at all for this game.