[J-ENT] Televiews / The boob tube continues to stunt potential in another shocking viewing week

July 27, 2008 by Dennis Amith

In the latest Televiews column by Wm. Penn for the Daily Yomiuri, Wm. Penn wrote, “This week: shocks, surprises and questions of identity. “Who am I?” What if you considered yourself a well-known comedian but you asked 100 people who you were and hardly anyone could tell you?”

“Would it be a wake-up call that brought on some serious self-reflection about your chosen career path? Or would you just try to spin it for more laughs?”

“Laughs are the choice of the struggling comedy talents on Fuji’s Friday night Prefectural Roulette, a game show where guests gather around a huge map of Japan, put down their bets and gamble on the archipelago. Regional scenes, customs and trivia tidbits are introduced, and the celebrity guests guess from which prefecture they come.”

“The show is just another example of how Japanese TV has moved out of its “wareware wa” highly homogeneous phase and dived into its “diversity of the archipelago” phase, in which we are now being persuaded the prefectures have very little in common at all. Aside from the much needed weekly geography lesson, the show doesn’t have too much worth recommending except that telling segment where they send the celebrities out into the provinces to be identified by 100 people.”