When I first heard about this show I was intrigued. What self-respecting adult doesn’t think that they’re smarter than a fifth-grader? My roommate sometimes watches stuff on his computer and I just so happened to catch a couple of episodes by proxy. The first thing I noticed was the theme song. It’s sung by children. What, is this show *for* fifth-graders? It didn’t take me long to realize that this show is monotonously boring. They talk forever about nothing. I don’t care about their personal life! Just ask the questions! They talk so damn much that they can only fit like six questions in a half hour. The questions are usually pretty boring too. I thought this was supposed to be a game show. Compare this to something like Cash Cab. It’s just question after question without any extra garbage. Now that’s a show. When the contestants answer their questions in AYSTAFG they always feel the need to totally explain how they came to their conclusion point by point and do the math out loud. If I wanted to experience long tedious explanations I’d watch Naruto or Yu-Gi-Oh. When they finally do answer, the audience always applauds. Why do they applaud? Any idiot can answer a question. The impressive thing would be if the answer is correct. Why don’t they just save their applause for that?
Also to my disappointment, the dynamics of the show were contrary to what I wanted/expected. Instead of pitting an adult and a fifth-grader against one another, similar to “Win Ben Stein‘s Money,” the fifth-grader is there for the sole purpose of helping the adult. They have a group of fifth-graders and the contestant gets to pick one to help them on each round. The kid answers along with the contestant but the contestant doesn’t know what their answer is. They get some lifeline things that they can use to get answers from the kid. That’s all they do. Wow, it turns out that the fifth-graders aren’t relevant to the game and are only minimally useful. What’s the point of having fifth-graders at all? Your help could just as easily come from a trained monkey or a fortune cookie. Come to think of it there used to be a show called “Street Smarts” where the players got their help from random people on the street. What was wrong with that? You actually got some variety and an interesting knowledge variable. You didn’t have a bunch of homogeneous robot children giving you answers. All of the kids always give a unanimous answer and they’re never wrong. When the contestant takes a kid’s answer with a lifeline the host always plays up the tension. Oh no, I hope she wrote down the correct answer or you lose. Since they’re never wrong it’s not tense at all. It’s like opening the bathroom door and saying, “Oh my God, I hope the toilet’s still there!”
When the contestant inevitably loses they have to say “I’m not smarter than a fifth-grader.” Well these aren’t normal fifth-graders. They select the smartest kids in the US to go on the show. It makes the whole premise of the show retarded. Oh, imagine that; a group of prodigy fifth-graders is more book smart than the average adult. I’m so surprised. The only reason most of them are probably on this show is because they have overbearing parents that orchestrate their lives for them and at some point decided that it would be a good way to showcase how great of a parent they are.
