lewser wrote: You missed the biggest problems: they constantly changed the rules to have henpecked players on the show (Rishi and Brandon), different rules for the games not on TV, only bringing in bags of boobs as supposed live jumpers, and finally having a never ending parade of dipshit New Yorkers that couldn't fight there way out of wet paper bags at trivia.
Why should I, in Nevada, or any place outside if the Tri-State area give a flying fuck about a show they i can't appear on unless i foot the travel bill...
The casting team (which I believe was independently contracted as a group) was under the impression that the show wanted the best trivia players, with a strong bias for knowledge base. They thought that the secondary facets were appearance and "life story." Candidly, they thought that my combination of military service, burn survival, and extensive volunteer work rocked, along with my ability to walk into a bar and rank first in the nation at Buzztime once or twice before departing.
They were wrong. The producer, Ryan Seacrest, had other priorities.
There was no way for the average guy to make it on the show, period. As the entire nation now knows, the "line jumpers" were chosen for being telegenic, with little regard for whether their trivia knowledge really matched that of the local champions picked from line. Of my group interviewed and tested for three days in Washington, DC not a soul was chosen to appear on-air. But there were videos of the line, there were videos of the Subway sandwich waiting room, and there were streaming videos of the off-air competition. The demographic mix changed as the line hit the waiting room--meaning some, apparently many by observation, were turned away before that point. The demographic mix changed again before people were chosen to compete off-air. Here's what I observed:
1) Young women with very pretty faces made up 50% of those chosen to play. Women without pretty faces were culled from the line, as were women over thirty. I saw one woman approaching her fortieth birthday competing well--but not quite well enough--off-air. She was the outlier.
2) Slender and fit men were chosen to play. The eventual champion, Andrew, was among the heaviest chosen to compete. He's got a 36 to 38 inch waist--he'll get big with age--but he's a young law school graduate, and he's still near the national median of BMI for men. A very few older men competed, but the weight issue was an absolute disqualifier. (As an aside, when I applied, I made it clear on the application that I was overweight, and they had a recent photo...the independent company brought me to the screen test, anyway.)
3) Being White Hispanic may have been a disqualifier: neither my wife (who watched on-air) nor I (who watched online) saw a White Hispanic selected to play. Also, all African-heritage Americans who sported anything other than business-appropriate casual professional or professional attire were denied the chance to compete. Whites and Asians in very casual garb got to play...but not Blacks. The line apparently had lots of both of those demographics (casually-clad African-heritage and White Hispanic individuals), and they never got to play.
But the bottom line is that unless you met certain criteria--which neither you or I would've met because of our weight, LEWSER--even standing in line was a waste of time. I found that misleading. From the pre-production blurbs, I'd thought that most of those in line would advance to compete for the money chair. That wasn't true. By casual observation of the demographics of the many line interview shots versus the demographics of the show, a substantial majority were disqualified because of age, weight, or ethnic appearance even before competing.
lewser wrote: ...(except the pretty, young, and blonde girls from Utah)? They also had a 'casting interview' at a trivia tournament in Vegas about a month ago, and it was painfully obvious that most didn't have the knockers to qualify.
Pretty and young were the two qualifiers for women, and it seems that more women than men were screened to get that 50-50 male-female mix...yeah. 
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