Steal My Ideas, Please

Have tryouts to find a new Three Stooges. The national search! The embarrassing auditions where the losers can’t help coming across with dignity and intelligence! The judges … who … hit each other with seltzer and pies?
My best reality-TV idea since “Beer Factor“?

Uh, I kind of forget to finish a puzzler I posed a while back: What’s the most a contestant could find during a normal game of Jeopardy!?
Here are the parameters: During each of the first two rounds there are six categories. In the first round, each category has these amounts up for grabs: $200, $400, […]

If you missed the question, and want to try to solve it, go to: “Puzzle: On ‘Jeopardy!’ What’s the Max Anyone Could Win?
To win the max, a player would have to question every answer correctly, and always bet the maximum on the Daily Doubles and in Final Jeopardy. The wrinkle is that each of the Daily Doubles would have […]

Who says celebs are truly interesting? Why not a book chronicling the struggles and wild lives of wannabes and gonnabes?

Two-person TV show. No, two-person showdown. Total knockdown debating, intellectually at a very high level, but “fighters” wear boxing gloves and dance around a ring, landing verbal jabs. It’s a play, it’s philosophy! Every week a new profound, always relevant topic. Could be a play, actually.

How do people react when they have everything?

“Vote for Me! My ugly opponent’s pro-death and he wants to raise everybody’s taxes! This ad, brought to you by the Committee to Re-Elect Joe Jerkweed at Any Cost, not only just wasted $20,000 that could have gone for several children’s health-care premiums, but it may cause headaches, nausea, vomiting, gullibility, insensitivity, and major regret. […]

There’s sports talk. Opinionated political talk. Even shows all about money. But why not TV-movie-music-media-Web-celebrities-and-maybe-also-a-little sports-and-sex talk? Key to good talk radio is having two lively hosts who often disagree (a la WIP in Philly), and who can juggle several hot topics at once, to hook a wide audience. Keep the whiny politics out of […]

Here’s an idea I’ll probably never do. But it’s one that has long intrigued me. Some people have amazing laughs. Shrill. Staccato. Lilts. Snorts. Wouldn’t it be cool to sample great laughs and compile them into a song? Hey, email me a clip of a wild laugh from your family or office, and I’ll start […]

Think an old person could be on Apprentice? Hah! But lots of people start new careers in middle-age. So how about a challenge? The Geezer Throwdown. Team of aging characters against a young, buff, cocky crew. For the right to form a new business and get it bankrolled.

Present a weekly whirlwind tour of all sorts of newspaper cartoons, from both comics and editorial pages. Shows inspired by a single strip pull a narrow audience. But delivering a variety of toons at a rapid-fire rate could appeal to almost everybody, young and old alike, in an easy, breezy, short-attention-span kind of way. DO […]

Hic. How wry I am. Anybody could brew a batch of wild possibilities. In fact, each episode could be a takeoff on some other reality show. Extreme Makeover: Beer Edition. Survivor: Beer Island. Beer Apprentice. Beer Swap. Weakest Clink. Who Wants to Chug Like a Millionaire. America’s Top Beer-Ad Model. Or maybe this whole premise […]

Back when the ratings of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? were falling, I offered an explanation and a solution in a newspaper article. Diagnosis (besides overexposure and foolishly butting heads with other strong shows): Viewers like to think they could win. Questions seemed fairly easy (making it fun to watch with your kids), and […]