It starts with "word"....

Bruce Springsteen sang about "57 channels and nothin' on" way back in the early 90's. Now, we have pretty close to 200 channels and there's still nothin' on. Except for an occasional network show now and then, we pretty much only watch Turner Classic Movies, Fox Movie Channel, Cartoon Network, American Life (for their reruns of the late 50's detective shows "77 Sunset Strip" and "Hawaiian Eye"), and the Game Show Network. We spend an hour a day watching two shows on GSN, Chuck Woolery's "Lingo" (which I'll discuss another time) and "Chain Reaction," hosted by the cutiepie Dylan Lane, below.



The show is a word game in which contestants have to guess a linked chain of words that go together in pairs. As the theme song notes, you might start with "word." There's a "g" underneath as the first letter of the 2nd word. You guess the word "game" and you're right! (The mini-chain being "word game"). The chain continues with a "b" which might be for "ball" (game ball), followed by "r" for "room" (ballroom), and so on. It's always, as Dylan helpfully tells us at the beginning of each show, his hands spread expansively and his eyebrows cocked as though he can barely believe what he's about to say, "a battle of the sexes"; a team of three women vs. three men. In each round, more money is at stake until at the end, one team has won, and plays a final word game with two team members constructing a question, one word at a time, to get the third to guess a secret word.

As both Don and I have taught English in the past, we were drawn in by the vocabulary play, and by the usual game-show appeal of watching ordinary people (smarties, doofusses, druggies, tramps, and hotties) struggle with answers which have become painfully obvious to us viewers who are under no bright-light pressure in our living rooms. But the attractive twinkie of a host is what keeps us watching every night. Lane used to be a VJ on Fuse, a fairly obscure music video channel, and I imagine someday he'll move on to being an entertainment-show host or to romantic leads in lighter-than-air Lifetime Christmas romance movies. But he may never be better than he is now, as the friendly host who manages to poke a little fun at some of the contestants' dumb answers without becoming snarky about it.

He's at his most appealing when he's squinting sexily across the set at the game board to read off the first and last words in the chain. He appears to be remarkably short--practically every contestant is taller than him, which becomes obvious in the final round when they're all standing around together. But he is usually a treat for the eyes, except when the producers mess with his look--at the beginning of the current season, his hair was long and dirty-looking, and his eyebrows needed shaving, which was weird because last season, he was always the perfect metrosexual. It's on Tuesday thru Saturday, 2 shows a night at 10:00 and 10:30. Of course, we're never up *that* late, so we always DVR it to watch during dinner, and so we can skip through the annoying chatter with the players--Lane could take a lesson or two from Alex Trebek on this, though to be fair, we also DVR Jeopardy so we don't have to watch the chatter.