TV Discussion

[Mike Bentley]

Discuss the TV from this tournament in this thread.

[Cheynem]

I was a little surprised (certainly not unhappy) with what seemed to me a slight skewing towards "old" in this category. I could not remember a preponderance of questions (tossups anyway) on shows actually on the television now. This leads I guess into an aesthetic discussion--should trash TV questions reward knowledge of people who watch TV and retain memory of what is on, or should it reward people who "study" TV and read about its history? Obviously, I would argue it should do both. People also don't seem to enjoy old TV questions a lot, although I would argue that with the increase in DVD sets and Hulu, it's becoming increasingly easier to actually watch and retain information from older programs. I did think it might have been a better idea to include more questions on network programming on the air today. I DO think those are actually hard to write because at times it can be difficult to determine what's notable if you're not a fan, while older TV shows have more obvious levels of "this is important, this isn't."

[Mike Bentley]

As I think I've mentioned elsewhere, the distribution for the TV in this tournament ended up being something like 2/2 post-1990 and 2/2 pre-1990. In retrospect, I think this gave too much space to old TV. For these older topics, I did try to choose clues that were important or more recent. I intentionally tried to include clues on revivals or to put more recent work of actors and actresses best known for their roles before 1990. I think there certainly is something to be said for knowing and studying older television, but I think I didn't quite strike the balance that I wanted to with regards to history vs. what the typical player playing this tournament would actually encounter. If I write another trash tournament like this, it would be more along the lines of 60-75% of the TV being post-1990.

[Cheynem]

I think something like 2/2 post 1998 or so may have been a better idea for that elusive target audience. I have to say though that it was pretty accessible old TV in the tossups for the most part--everything tossed up was either very notable or had been made into a major film/revival post 1990.

[gregpweinstein]

I agree that the tv distribution seemed to skew older, even on shows or actors/actresses I would have gotten were given older clues to start out, though I still did really well and as always powered every tv show that I watch and there was one mistake in here that cost us a point on the bonus of Hung, where you it seemed some words got mixed around and you called anne heche the pimp instead of jane adams, other than that I dont remember any inaccuracies and the questions were good. so kudos