Family Feud Rules

I was home sick years ago, when I was still living at my parent’s house, and was flipping through broadcast TV looking for something that was entertaining enough to distract me from my discomfort, but also not too hard to follow, since I couldn’t really focus too closely on anything for very long, when I saw my first episode of Family Feud with Steve Harvey as host. It was like an entirely different show under Steve’s direction. The suits! The expressions on his face when a contestant said something crazy! He’d look right into the camera and let you know he was in on what was truly entertaining about this show: it revealed surprisingly honest snippets of the inner working of the average mind.

A typical trivia show self selects the eggheads, the individuals obsessed with details, those with particularly strong memorization skills. People drawn relentlessly to facts. But Family Feud’s aims are more social: how well do you know the everyman and his mundane preferences?

This is why I didn’t like Family Feud. The answer the show looks for isn’t the real answer, but the perceived one. Actually, not even the perceived single answer, but a small collection of commonly assumed answers. I imagined the people taking the survey, not listing even their own preferences, but what they thought other people would prefer. And then on the show, contestants had to guess what other people had guessed still other people would say. It was as convoluted as a game of telephone. I couldn’t wrap my head around how this could be considered a skill. Why would someone pay people to do this? Why would anyone watch it?

But this afternoon, I watched it. Episode after episode, fantastic Steve reaction after fantastic Steve reaction, black family after black family losing to white family after white family (it’s deeply troubling, but it’s true. In the Steve Harvey episodes, there’s always one white family, and one black family, and the white family always plays worse the whole game, and then wins in the last round. It’s like Steve negotiated with the producers to get some black families on the show, and the producers said okay, but only if they always loose. I looked this up trying to see if someone’s written about it, and all I could find is a lot of very hateful Reddit posts about how there are too many Black families on the show. Seriously. Why are people so awful?)

When I reach for examples of the power of public perception, I’m reminded of Arya Stark wandering the alleyways of Braavos, and coming across a theater troupe performing a play about her family. She’s bewildered at the mischaracterization of people she knows well, at how these sentiments completely twist and reverse what she knows first hand to be true, and she realizes from the crowd’s uproarious laughter that this false narrative must be the commonly held view of recent events. It sets her on a journey toward learning to channel the power of illusion and perception for herself.

You could argue that what a survey says has every bit as much power as absolute truth. We are currently conducting a massive surveying of the territory between democracy and mob rule, the fault lines coinciding with information, who knows what and how that knowledge is received. A single ruler can be just as misinformed as a group, and perhaps it’s better, more palatable, to all live with the consequences of our own collective action than under the consequences of a single corrupted individual. But the point is that, in focusing on truth and ignoring perception, we forfeit worthier outcomes. We are not victims of the reality happening around us, the truth isn’t just what happens to us. We create a shared reality by collectively insisting on it.

Here’s a lower stakes way of looking at it: how many people’s favorite type of pizza is plain cheese? It is flavor that exists almost exclusively for parties, blank flavor, non-topping, null set. But how often is it assumed to be the best compromise, short of asking everyone who might eat the pizza which toppings they prefer and which they absolutely refuse to eat and then doing a complicated grid analysis to find the ideal topping set? If you’ve ordered a cheese pizza, it was for a group. But in your lifetime, you have probably ordered a cheese pizza. You manifested the reality of cheese pizza based on your assumptions about your fellow human and her preferences. You may have even encountered a party in the past year where cheese was the only flavor left when you got to the hastily stacked boxes in the corner (red flag, oh great hivemind host of all parties! Make note of what is left untouched and do better!), and went ahead and ate a slice anyway. We create a shared reality by collectively insisting on it.

What would Family Feud look like if survey participants answered for themselves, with their own preferences, no matter how obscure they believed their favorite things to be? Would their answers actually be bizarre and unguessable, like both Charlie’s and Dennis’s answers in the Family Fight episode of Sunny? Would contestants have to come up with a much larger list of answers to hit 100 points? Or would we find that our preferences might not match our immediate neighbors’, but might be more common than we ever imagined?

What new things would we discover that we loved if we were exposed to more passion and less compromise?