Cool set, backbeat, hosts can’t disguise quiz show

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 11/12/2001 (8941 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

THIS is not your parents’ high-school quiz show.Well, actually, it sort of is, when you get right down to it.

Despite being styled up with a cheeky title, a graffiti-clad set, a pounding hip-hop backbeat and a decidedly streetwise attitude, CBC’s new scholastic competition, Smart Ask!, is really not that far removed from its long-running predecessor, Reach For the Top.

Behind all the aforementioned distractions, what it’s about is brainy kids answering general-knowledge questions. And whether there’s enough “cool” in this new show’s ambitious packaging to make it a regular stop for TV-watching Canadian teens is something the current high-school crop itself must decide.

Smart Ask!, which premieres today at 5:30 p.m. on CBC and airs Tuesdays through Fridays in that slot, pits three-member teams from schools across Canada (including several from Manitoba) against one another in a tournament-style question-and-answer contest that will culminate in a trio of prime-time championship specials.

Canadian hip-hop personality Michie Mee acts as the show’s host, with rising-star comedian Justin Landry serving as Smart Ask!’s resident quizmaster.

Just as Reach For the Top did during its 1961-85 run, Smart Ask! challenges its contestants with several rounds of questions drawn from a variety of academic and pop-culture topic areas. Point values increase from 20 to 50 to 100 for each correctly answered question, and the final 50-point “lightning round” (RFTT’s ubiquitous “short snappers” label probably carries too much joke-fodder baggage to be used here) compounds the competitive risk by subtracting 50 points for each incorrect response.

The questions range from quite advanced (What does the acronym PCB stand for? Which coal burns more cleanly — anthracite or bituminous?) to positively lame (from a category focused on celebrities named Bob: What is Doug MacKenzie’s brother’s name?). The show is structured in a way that affords teams that fall behind early more than ample opportunity to catch up during the stretch run.

In an age when most TV game shows are associated with million-dollar payouts and/or villainously abrasive hosts, Smart Ask! arrives as a modest, not-for-profit quizzer that generates more than its share of suspense and excitement.

And in true game-show fashion, at the end of each instalment the winners advance and the losers go home.

If there’s a major risk being run by Smart Ask!, it’s that teens might find all its cosmetic affectations too cynical to be believed and will reject the entire package outright. There is, after all, something just a tiny bit disingenuous about having leather-clad, ultra-cool Michie Mee “hangin'” with some Prairie bookworm in the show’s artificially boisterous audience.

The host offers a little hip-hop slang, and then the conversation takes a culture-shocked U-turn as the bespectacled and camera-shy student chats earnestly about being the stage manager on the school’s latest musical production. Later, a contestant sends an equally jarring “shout out” to the members of his tennis team.

It’s an obvious case of trying to foist urban cool onto suburban un-cool. As audience-grabbing tactics go, this one’s transparent, unconvincing and probably quite unnecessary.

Some kids are smart (that’s why they’re here); some kids are cool; some kids are both; others are neither. And all of them are bright enough to know when they’re having their shorts snapped by an overzealous and slightly out-of-touch TV producer.

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