Catchy Title

Alright.  Obligatory first post.  Ahem.

Someone at work turned me on to a show called QI.  It's a BBC quiz show hosted by Stephen Fry (yes, that Stephen Fry) featuring a panel of guest "experts."  They call them experts because they're generally extremely dumb.  QI stands for Quite Interesting.  The idea is that points are distributed on the basis of being interesting (ideally, by knowing interesting pieces of trivia)--but mostly by not being obvious.  Obvious (and incorrect) answers are penalized.  The show often ends up with every panel member receiving a negative score.

There are a lot of problems with the show, although it has become extremely popular in Britain.  Fry is excellent, of course, even when he's an appalling, overbearing bore.  He loves to be pompous, and his panelists (being comedians) really prefer to just dick around, which leads to a lot of directionless talk-show shenanigans.  That said, when the show is interesting, it is very much so, and when it is funny I have been known to choke on beverages.

Like Cash Cab, QI has a tendency to focus way too much on a specific geographical and cultural region that I don't care about (NY and GB, respectively).  That irks me.

The reason it irks me is that since I was really, really young I loved Jeopardy!.  Yes, Jeopardy! has an exclamation mark.  The exclamation mark is important, dammit.  Anyway, I loved Jeopardy!.  I loved it before I could pronounce it correctly.  I still love it.  I actually felt hurt when that stupid IBM ringer stomped on Ken Jennings.  Ken Jennings, who is kind of a douche, is nevertheless awesome for kicking ten kinds of ass on Jeopardy!.  And he was mercilessly destroyed by a soulless internet-trolling robot.  That made me sad.  And he had the good grace to accept his defeat with a smile and a nod at internet culture.  That...  Actually, that made me sad, too.  He should have set Watson (or maybe himself) on fire in dramatic protest.

I digress.

QI is not really a quiz show.  It is irritating, despite the trivia, precisely because the competition isn't really a competition at all. The reason Jeopardy! is awesome is the chance it offers to be superior to someone else.  In QI, because the questions are designed merely to be interesting to a specific group of viewers--and to be answered incorrectly even by those in the know--it is basically impossible to for me to answer questions correctly from the comfort of my couch.  On top of that, since the points don't matter--that's right, the points are just like any job you can get with a liberal arts degree--there are literally no consequences for either suckage or superiority.  And that irks me, simply because I expect my quiz shows to actually be quiz shows.  After I realized that QI cannot properly be understood as a quiz show, I was able to enjoy it again.

For all my bitching, the show is redeemed by both its ridiculousness and its occasional moments of true hilarity.  I recommend checking it out.  You might like it.

-Sleepyhead