The Chair and The Chamber

The conversation must have gone like this:

ABC Drone 1: Look! I found a pile of medical equipment.

ABC Drone 2: And I found a pile of retired tennis pros.

[They bump into each other]

ABC Drone 1: Hey, you got your medical equipment on my tennis pro!

ABC Producer [bursting in]: And I've got an idea for a new reality game show!

In a sports-casting coup that outranks the Howie Long/Teri Hatcher Radio Shack ads, ABC has recruited John McEnroe, one of the greatest tennis players of all time, to host "The Chair," which will premiere this Tuesday, January 15th. On "The Chair," contestants will sit in a big... chair, and be quizzed while attached to a heart monitor. A contestant who can answer correctly without his base heart rate exceeding "a predetermined range" will win a "money prize."

Not to be outdone, Fox — with the assistance of producer Dick Clark — has rushed to air on January 13 the non-tennis-player-hosted "The Chamber." Fox's show puts players in an enclosed environment, throws different "challenges" at them, and "monitors their body functions." There has even been some litigation resulting from the similarity of these shows, a fact just as utterly shocking as the fact that both shows were apparently able to find Hollywood doctors willing to waste their medical degrees reading and interpreting heart monitors for game shows.

If McEnroe's presence on "The Chair" is meant to menace the contestants and agitate their tickers even more than the no doubt nerve-wracking "Millionaire"-type music they'll play, he'd better be his old belligerent self, and not just some contrived curmudgeon, like shrill, scripted poseur Anne Robinson. Mac is a shit starter (and, not uncoincidentally, this writer's all-time favorite tennis player), and watching him harangue some immobilized used car salesman from Texas the way he did with the refs at his matches might just make "The Chair" worth checking out.

Of course, if these shows are taking heart monitors away from actual sick people, well, we just can't get behind that. But if medical equipment is available for game shows, things could get interesting. How about putting Dick Cheney in "The Chair," and asking him about Enron? Or hooking up some sort of phallo-meter to a panel of horny Conservative males, parading some former Miss Sacramentos with communications degrees in front of them, and playing "Who Wants to Be a Fox News Reader?" (The winner is the one who gets the biggest "response" from the panel.)

Still, you can't ignore the basic invasion of privacy involved with this new brand of "reality game show". Why would anyone submit to having their body functions monitored on national television? Is it worth the Z-list celebrity that might result from it? The most that could possibly happen is this:

Customer: Hi. I was recently strapped in a chair with electrodes on my chest while being hassled by tennis legend John "Superbrat" McEnroe. Can I get a deal on this stereo?

Salesman: Hmm. I don't know. I just made an alternate from "The Real World Miami" pay full price. Let's see...was this aired nationally?

Customer: Yes, sir!

Salesman: Weeellll, okay. 20 percent off.

— Karen Lurie (karen@flakmag.com)