Lots of Survivor/reality questions in the TV Stars Mixed category today. These people aren't TV Stars.

They are known to the world (many people, if not me) for their appearance on television, and those shows feature the people who are at their centre. There is really no more suitable place I can think of for the quizzes about them, even if I personally don't consider them to be in the same class as the actors I consider "real" stars.

It's a bit like the eternal Star Wars issue - those mass-produced exploitation books can only be called Science Fiction, and they belong in Literature because they are published books. They aren't the quality of Asimov and Heinlein, but they are SciFi.

It depends on your definition of "TV stars" I guess. Many reality show contestants go on to participate in more reality shows. They appear on talk shows and game shows. They end up being talk show and game show hosts. One even migrated to a "news opinion" channel briefly after she left her multi year stint as a co-host on a talk show.

Exactly this. I know there have been a lot of complaints about this category in the past. I ended up making a quiz about past 'Survivor' contestants within the past couple years and it's been moderately well-received. I think people might be surprised by how many have actually done more than just the show.

If anyone is interested in redressing the balance in that section, I can hint that you would be rewarded for doing so in TRIC in the next couple of weeks.

I don't disagree with calling "Survivor" contestants TV Stars. A TV star is (arguably) anyone who is known because of their appearance on a TV show.

The reason that this comes up is because of the predominance of questions about people on "Survivor" in the Heroes game when the category is TV Stars Mixed. It appears that MIXED usually refers to quizzes about multiple people. All the quizzes in the TV Stars Mixed category that are not in the Survivors subcategory are about a mixed group. Many are about a group of actors from a specific show such as "The Golden Girls", actors who made appearances on "Cheers", and actors on "Lost". Others are about a particular type of TV stars such as Game Show Contestants or Women Crime Fighters or Celebrity Chefs. (The latter is a subcategory, but the descriptions of all quizzes in that subcategory indicate they are asking questions about more than one person.)

In contrast, the only quiz in the "Survivors" subcategory that is truly "mixed" is Kyle's. The other 28 quizzes in that subcategory are about individual contestants on the show. (Elisabeth, Colby, Ethan Zohn,...)
So it appears that if a quiz is about an individual TV star who was on Survivor it goes in TV Stars Mixed, but if a quiz is about an individual TV star on any other show it doesn't go into TV Stars Mixed. I believe that's why there are so many more questions about people on Survivor than about anyone else when the Heroes game is for TV Stars Mixed and that's why people question the Heroes category.

If someone were to write a quiz about Ken Jennings, a TV Star because of his long run on Jeopardy!, would that go in TV Stars Mixed? Or would it go under Celebrities H-J?

(Looney tunes - I agree this is like the Star Wars issue for the same reason. I don't think people were saying the Star Wars books aren't science fiction or don't belong in Literature. The argument is why they aren't treated the same way as other science fiction books.)

Agree wholeheartedly with the comments of Julia103 above. People who appear in reality shows (other than the hosts) are no more "stars" than contestants on game shows. It doesn't matter that a few of them (very few, actually) go on later to become legitimately famous for something else because they got their "start" on a reality show. A lot of actors got their starts on commercials. Are we supposed to call anyone who appeared in a commercial a "star" because of that? The sheer ridiculousness of calling them "stars" will only become more embarrassing and obvious as the years pass and the quizzes these "stars" were featured in become useful only for the Impossible category of the Global Challenge. This corruption of the meaning of the word "star" should be protested vociferously until common sense prevails, sooner rather than later. Mixed quizzes that draw on the source quizzes that define these people as "stars" are an abomination and are destroying the usefulness of whole categories of mixed quizzes as they proliferate.

I scratch my head wondering why they are called 'reality' shows. Many of the concepts are totally opposed to reality

Ouch. Sorry for ruining the category.

Yeah, Kyle, the one quiz by you in the subcategory really ruined the category.

I do agree the labels 'star' and 'superstar' are applied so often now that have lost their original meaning as someone special, someone with exceptional talent.

Right on. There needs to be a differentiation between TV Stars and TV Personalities. Bob Barker was only a TV personality; Drew Carey was a TV star who became a TV personality, in my opinion. Actors are the TV stars; and game show hosts and contestants, newscasters and national weathermen are not the 'stars', but recognizable TV personalities. Again, in my opinion.

I think this is part of the catch with all of the concerns here. As a player, where do you look for these quizzes?

If we place them in the TV category for 'Survivor', they become one of the only instances in the category where the questions are not derived from the show.

If we place them anywhere else in the Celebs category, all of a sudden we're separating people who appeared in TV shows out from the dedicated TV subcategory.

The minute we have a quiz that mixes Reality TV contestants, where does that go?


The definition of 'star' and 'personality' aside, the people in these quizzes are from that medium and their success is derived, generally, from TV appearances; it's the thread that binds them. The other catch is that many of the quizzes there were written when 'Survivor' was one of the top shows on TV (twenty years ago!). These people were icons for an emerging genre of television and many of them did permeate cultural discourse for a good amount of time, often appearing on many other TV shows, in movies, or in the news. This is obviously less so now, especially with 'Survivor', but it's not the line we draw in the sand for disallowing these quizzes.


The likely solution here is to omit the 'Survivor' subcat from TV Stars Mixed in dailies/hourlies. It's a bit disappointing that my quiz-- which I put in there to redress the imbalance of more specific ones in the subcat-- doesn't really help in any way. The problem here is, of course, that doing this cuts out a third of the content (and makes all of those daily/hourly quizzes 20% chefs and talk show hosts).

The solution I prefer is writing for the imbalance, like we ask for in other categories. Yada yada be the change, etc.
It doesn't solve the issue right now, but it seems like people are less willing to help develop a compromise and just want them gone altogether.


Regardless of whether or not people think they're stars, some of us enjoy the content and don't find it embarrassing. But I mean, I guess I'll take that too.