ABSTRACT
The former president of Yale, who was later commissioner of baseball, stated, "We can learn far more about the conditions and values of a society by contemplating how it chooses to play, to use its free time, to take its leisure, than by examining how it goes about its work" (Giamatti, 1989, p. 13). TV game shows serve especially well for telling us about the "conditions and values of a society" because the genre is so malleable, so cheap to produce locally, and so ubiquitous.
