Identity
The newest game show joining the ranks of Deal or No Deal is Identity. In the game, a contestant must assign 12 identities to 12 strangers based on their appearance. Hosted by magician Penn Jillette, Identity may be the most socially relevant game show yet.
Penn Jillette Talks Playing Identity
"It's not really a topical show," said Jillette. "The need to identify people that you're bumping into in evolutionary terms goes back to about, oh, the time of the tadpole. You really need to know who you're dealing with and what I thought was so fascinating about the show when they first brought it to me is every other game show that I can think of, which of course is not every one of them, you have to decide to play along. You have to make the decision that I want to put myself in the position of a contestant. Whereas this game show, I believe that if you just showed 12 strangers on TV, people would automatically play it. I mean, every shopping mall you go to, every street you walk down, you look at people and say, 'What's their story?' So the idea that there's some topical thing with profiling and so on really does do it a slight injustice because it's bigger than that. We really do care about other human beings and this is a way to do a really fun caricature of what are you, what do you do and have fun with something that we all do automatically every second."
Anyone who's seen Quiz Show knows that modern game shows are highly regimented, so not even Jillette knows the identities of the 12 strangers. "It also allowed our whole crew to experience it because game shows are so careful and the legality is so carefully watched, just lousy with lawyers, which isn't necessarily the way to prove it's honest but that is my point. It's kept so honest that everybody plays the game. What really blew my mind is these jaded sound men who've seen every show in the world, when they come over to change my battery pack, I've never had anybody in any of the shows I've done before actually talk to me about the show. They would come over to change my battery pack and go, 'So Penn, how's the show going? Do you think the one in red's the sword swallower?' I was really surprised by the fact that this show has such a deep, primal force to it that even the people who've done a million shows are forced to play along just because it's part of caring about other people."
Viewers may think it's easy at first, with sushi chefs wearing Japanese garb and fitness models flexing in bikinis, but that's just to give you a false sense of security. "Some of them are gimmes and as far as the exact ratio, I believe what we're going for is an interesting kind of fun mix that people really like playing at home."
Harkening back to shows like To Tell the Truth, the simply larger pool allows for more subtle differences. "You're also dealing with 12 instead of 3 so that allows you to have more that are giveaways and more to have fun with and so on. And more to be surprised by when people at home find one easy and sometimes the contestant has a little more trouble with it. That's pretty interesting to see what areas you know and what areas you don't. I found that fascinating. I'm not a big sports fan so some of the sports absolute gimmes went right by me whereas I certainly wouldn't have any trouble picking out Stan Lee ever.
Tested on professionals, Identity is FBI certified to keep you guessing. "When Andrew [Robbins] first pitched this to me as it were, when he first invited me to be part of the game, at first I was seeing it as just a game of chance and therefore much less interesting. Then during the first 10 minutes of his pitch, kind of in passing, he mentioned that they had an FBI behavioral specialist, FBI profiler who had been playing the game perfectly during their practices. Every time they asked him about something, he was absolutely dead right, and that is what really fascinated me about the game. I said to him, 'Y were a counterterrorist unit and you've been a sniper, do you know Jack Bauer?' And he said, 'I am Jack Bauer.'"
Identity airs at 8PM on NBC.
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