"The Price Is Right" received some criticism yesterday when a contestant in a wheelchair won a game and was rewarded with a treadmill and a sauna. The video went viral, often with the word "fail" attached.
The criticism is completely wrong. The producers of the show couldn't have known ahead of time that the woman in the wheelchair would get up there with Drew Carey at that moment, so they couldn't have planned that she'd be playing for a treadmill. And it would have been impossible at that point to have switched out the prizes for something else -- not just logistically, but legally, since game shows are quite regulated to ensure that no one has a better chance of winning this instead of that. Besides, the winner seems thrilled and, even if she's physically unable to use the treadmill, she may have a partner/spouse for whom it's the perfect gift.
So the "fail" tag doesn't belong to "The Price Is Right" but rather (as is true so often) to the trolls online.Labels: television