‘You are a snake,’ says youtuber Rick Broers to thriller writer Thomas Olde Heuvelt. They sit together in ‘water’ – a ‘habitat’ which, remarkably enough, takes shape in the form of all kinds of vintage furniture in a shed. ‘I mustn’t kill you. I believe.’ Thomas thinks. ‘Because, you can attack animals, but you don’t have to. However?’ It could also be that Thomas is a chameleon, Rick philosophizes further. Thomas leafs through the flyer with the rules again.
Thomas and Rick are not the only ones Eat Or Be Eatenthe first assignment in the new NTR game show The Genius, not quite grasp. Even after three explanations by the voice-over, the game remains completely incomprehensible, for viewers and participants. The ten players are each assigned an animal and have to eat each other, which is not done very spectacularly by sticking stickers on their shoulders. They move in the shed through different habitats. Additional animal-specific rules apply to each animal. They keep changing. In the end, most of them just sit in the ‘land’ habitat, looking a little sheepishly at each other.
Last spring I was approached by the NTR: if I wanted to participate in their brand new game show. The format revolved around participants with diverse talents. Criminal lawyers, vloggers, athletes. They had me in mind as a ‘journalist’.
I don’t know why I didn’t hear anything anymore, but there’s a good chance it went wrong when the editor asked if I think winning is important. “No,” I said, “I’m not competitive at all.” With that answer I immediately gave myself away as a worthless candidate: I am far too honest. A successful game show contestant can pretend to be completely absorbed in the game in any situation, thinking of nothing but winning. Even if the rules are incomprehensible, the set dressing lousy, the fellow candidates stiff.
It is precisely this characteristic that makes watch dealer Jasper Lijfering such a dream candidate. Immediately after arriving in the shed, he confidently presents himself as bad guy. ‘So, a group of smart people together’, he says, looking around the circle, ‘and a youtuber’. sharp. When he negotiates about his survival as a crocodile with tiktoker Roxanne Kwant – a lion – he tells in the confessional deadly serious that you ‘always have to know exactly to whom you pass which information’. Tirelessly he sticks stickers on shoulders. ‘Eat or be eatenHowever?’
‘I don’t get the fuck about this,’ says comedian Fabian Franciscus when he does not die after a sticker of Lijfering has been put on. Nobody understands a fuck, neither does Bondering, but instead of admitting it, he looks conspiratorially into the distance.
A game show like The Genius relies on types like Bondage: people who find it so important to appear interesting on TV that they persistently pretend that a completely incomprehensible game knows how to captivate them. It’s a real shame that he was the first to leave the field after an inimitable card game last night. Anyway, eat or be eaten: we will see this boy more often.