Wanna Play with Bombs on TV? Now You Can!

Here's a game show that some folks may not want to play. Fox just dropped the bomb (pun intended) with its new game show Boom! which features explosive bombs. As we all know, nothing says "family-friendly network acquisition" like something that symbolizes a fatality. So grab the popcorn and gather 'round the television, kids.

Boom! features four contestants racing against a very aggressively ticking clock to answer questions. Each answer to the multiple choice questions is represented by a different colored wire connected to a bomb — snip the right wire, you've diffused the right bomb! (At-home viewers can play along, too, but without the bombs.)

It sounds... terrifying, to say the least. It's disturbing to take something that connotes death and fuse it with a game. However, it's a macrocosm of what game shows actually are: get the question right, win big! Don't get it right, and you lose big (with a BOMB EXPLODING). Not to mention, the show is wildly popular in Israel, where it airs on Keshet DCP, which is a joint effort of Israel's Keshet and Dick Clark Production's DC Media.

Simon Andrae, who acquired the series for Fox, said the following (and this is without a trace of irony, mind you):

Boom! is a perfect blend of family entertainment and Fox attitude, [...] Never has a ticking clock been so ingeniously placed at the center of a game, and never has a game more inventively borrowed from the language of a thriller. It's as if Jack Bauer made brain love with Jeff Foxworthy.

Brain love? Eww. (And do you really think Jack Bauer would want his brains to get it on with Jeff Foxworthy? Nothing against him, I just wouldn't say he's Bauer's type, ya know?)

24, however popular it was, was not a game show. Homeland and Who Wants To Be A Millionaire are also two television shows that are generally not mentioned in the same sentence (until now, I suppose!). In a similar vein, people LOVED E.R. back in the day, but would we ever have a game show set in a hospital in which contestants snip wires connected to patients' capillaries? (PLEASE, NOBODY DO THAT.)

What this is, without a doubt, is a business venture for Andrae (duh) who sees show's popularity in the Middle East as a surefire bet for Fox. We'll have to see when it airs if its allegedly thrilling nature is worth the disturbing notion that it suggests.

Image: FOX