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Of all the great things about television, the greatest is that it’s on every single day. TV history is being made, day in and day out, in ways big and small. In an effort to better appreciate this history, we’re taking a look back, every day, at one particular TV milestone.
IMPORTANT DATE IN TV HISTORY: July 10, 2006
PROGRAM ORIGINALLY AIRED ON THIS DATE: The World Series of Pop Culture, “The Velvet Rope Revolution vs. Lazer Wolves/3 the Hard Way vs. PDX 503” (Season 1, Episode 1) [Stream on YouTube]
WHY IT’S IMPORTANT: It’s become trite to say of a TV show that was cancelled after a too-brief time on the air that we were unworthy of — or not ready for — it. But that’s exactly what happened when VH1 aired The World Series of Pop Culture in the summer of 2002. Pop culture trivia on television has always been something of an elusive chanteuse. Either the TV networks get worried that the audience that would tune in for pop-culture TV must be MTV-generation ADD freaks and thus load it up with as many bells and whistles as possible in order to keep them from flipping channels. This was the case with the previous mantle-holder for best pop-culture TV quiz show of all time, MTV’s Remote Control, wherein host Ken Ober would ask barcalounger-seated contestants questions about pop culture while popcorn would fall from the ceiling and a pre-SNL Adam Sandler would enact weird skits. It was totally fun, but it never quite scratched the itch of the trivia purist. On the other side of the coin is a show like Jeopardy, pristine in its trivia bona fides, rigorous and giving you an excellent questions-to-blather ratio. But while Jeopardy reliably delivers at least one pop-culture category per episode, it’s only a fraction of the show, the questions are never that hard, and it gets infuriating to watch the smarty-pants contestants flee from pop culture questions like the snobs they (sometimes) are.
But then came The World Series of Pop Culture, which stood out from the VH1 programming of the day (mostly Flavor of Love spinoffs) and more importantly, it stood out for being uncompromisingly nerd-bait. This was real pop culture trivia, for real pop-culture nerds. It’s simultaneously hard to believe it ever made it onto TV and also hard to believe it wasn’t a monster hit. The format was simple: teams of 3 (most of whom were IRL friends) competed in a tournament bracket, answering moderate-to-difficult questions about pop-culture trivia, delivered in bone-dry tones by New York 1 news broadcaster Pat Kiernan. These days, non-New Yorkers would likely recognize Kiernan as the local-news guy (Ghostbusters; Night at the Museum; several Marvel movies), but The World Series of Pop Culture was his first national breakthrough. If you attend the local trivia nights Kiernan still hosts occasionally in Brooklyn, The World Series of Pop Culture is still the featured credit in his intro (sorry, Iron Man 3).
Kiernan wasn’t screaming for the audience’s attention (the whole thing took place in New York’s venerated Ziegfeld Theater, giving it the ambiance of a Broadway audition or something similarly prestigious). He kept a dry sense of humor, but he was also very question-focused. Similarly, the teams were clearly encouraged to brand themselves with team names and (in most cases) matching outfits, but there wasn’t a whole lot of business done with them. It was perfectly calibrated trivia, the teams had enough personality that you knew who you liked and who you hated, and the tournament format meant you could tune back in to see how favorite/least-favorite teams were doing.
Alas, the World Series of Pop Culture only lasted two brief seasons, enough to tantalize countless trivia nerds with the possibility that they too could one day ascend to the stage at the Ziegfeld and show off their knowledge of Melrose Place arcana or Alanis Morissette lyrics. It burned brightly, but we let it slip away. Thank God for YouTube, at least.
