It was inevitable in a culture like our own that it would eventually become impossible to separate the perception of new entertainment from people's memories of old entertainment. That's why today we're living in an atmosphere of thick, postmodern reference. It's a time when everybody has seen something like whatever's on screen. Whole movies are based around subverting the conventions of their own genres, like romantic comedies that are unexpectedly lewd. For game shows this self-awareness poses a particularly vexing problem. How do you keep viewers interested in a format that has all but been exhausted? To an extent, a game show needs its audience to suspend disbelief. It needs them to buy into the idea of winning something big in public, to believe that the show takes place in a special world and not in a dangerously thin facade. For a lot of shows, the last refuge is a winking admission of just how absurd game shows actually are.

The first game show to really rely on meta gaming was The Price is Right. After an initial 9-year run in the 50's and 60's, the show was reinvented in 1972 in the form that's still running today. In fact, the extent to which The Price is Right in 2010 is similar to the show in 70's is part of the joke and part of the fun. What began as a shameless promotion of consumerism slowly transformed into a surreal, forever-shag experience divorced from anything true or common. As the post-bidding games became more bizarre and esoteric, the personae of both the contestants and hosts became more outsized. Host Bob Barker, a TV lifer, became synonymous with the gently taunting salesman who made Price famous. The thrill of the game was no longer in the prizes or the momentary fame of being on TV. Honestly, by the 1980's the prizes were often mundane (a new living room set, a vacation to a flyover state) and the people featured on Price seemed selected for being caricatures of modern America. People watched the show for catchphrases like the famous $1 bid and the wild (almost certainly coached) behavior of the contestants, not the fantasy of the game itself.

As weird as Price is, Hollywood Squares takes the blue ribbon for being the least reality-bound game show in history. Unlike most shows, Hollywood Squares never even attempted to be real. It was always a depository for one-liners and celebrity gossip. Though it's not uncommon for game shows to revolve around childishly simplistic games (what is Wheel of Fortune but a high-stakes game of Hangman?), Hollywood Squares makes a conscious mockery of this by being a televised game of Tic-Tac-Toe. It's unlikely in this setup that any viewer ever cared about the contestants or even the game itself. Hollywood Squares was about America's love affair with celebrity culture, the fantasy of glamorous lives wrapped in the fantasy of game shows.

A concept like HS is inherently absurd, but it took a bid for straight-up comedy to really dismantle the game show format altogether. Comedy Central's minor hit Win Ben Stein's Money diminished the game show/celebrity concept to an intensely strange level. It winkingly played upon Stein's image as a brainy, humorless teacher figure and made the stakes so low with a grand prize amount of $5000 that there was really no great fantasy about appearing on the show. If anything, the fantasy of WBSM was to contribute to the field of comedy, to make people laugh while sharing the stage with people who would always be more famous than you. It's a hipster's game show, one that makes fun of the very concept by being silly and pointless itself.