Playmania!

On the flight back from vacation, I ran out of things to watch on the seat-back TV after Cops ended. Mind you this was about an hour into a six-hour flight that ended near dawn eastern time (although we got home around midnight thanks to the zone difference.) The TV's were on the eastern feed.

Mind you, at 2am you take what you can get. And what I got was PlayMania. Let me tell you, gentle readers, about PlayMania, a marathon quiz-show aimed at nerds. Only more so than other quiz-shows.

PlayMania takes a page from the Book of Spike and G4. That is, if you have it hosted by hot chicks in tight clothes, and peppered with enough sound effects to drive a Foley artist to suicide, desperate trolls living in their parents' basements will watch devoutly and think they're as hip as the hosts, and that they have some sort of chance of fucking them. PlayMania is hosted alternately by Token British Woman (the Brits pioneered this field by having Cat Deeley host everything they broadcast over there) and Shandi Finnessey, former Miss USA, right-wing pro-war crackpot, and failed Dancing with the Stars contestant. Shandi fails to bare her oiled-up midriff like the did on Dancing. Although, in her favor, she appears to be quite drunk throughout the ordeal.

Here's how it works. Audience members at home (on eastern time only- it's live) pay good money to enter random contests via IM or a 900 number. Some of them are chosen to play along with our hostesses, doing things like guessing letters a la Wheel of Fortune, or identifying the missing parts of pictures (one of these was actually a cartoon car missing wheels, and yet several callers couldn't notice this either due to inebriation or retardation). For this, they almost earn enough money to cover the fifty calls they placed through the night trying to get on the air and mack on the girls.

Every once in a while, a buzzer rings, barely audible over the constant thumping of bad dance music that Shandi is waving her arms and freaking out to. That means it's e-mail time, and time for Shandi (Token Brit was largely absent- I later learned she was only in taped footage, since she quit and fled back home to England just a couple weeks ago) to read messages from viewers. The messages that make it to air are always slightly embarrassing, accompanied by pictures of the 40-year-old dweeb who sent them, and probably heavily censored. I'd hate to see what Shandi gets shielded from.

Even as a captive viewer (it was this or infomercials) PlayMania only became tolerable after I muted it. I could still follow along with the games visually, but didn't have to listen to the terrible techno incidental music, Shandi's bizarre whooping and squeaking, or the virgins calling in to propose to her. I could still watch her whoosh her arms around like she was batting away tiny elves, and can only guess that there are certain things she must do to stay awake at that hour, or that she was trying to hypnotize us. I don't think hearing her speak would have enlightened me on the subject.

Sadly, after two excruciating hours, the show ended and I had to spend the rest of the flight actually watching infomercials. That means PlayMania weighs in about six hours shorter than Sabado Gigante, but twice as long as people can stand being exposed to Howie Mandel. And unlike Howie, Shandi is doing this every damn night. That's a lot of desperate nerd calls.