Product Description

From the revolutionary mind of television's legendary mad genius, a story of money, sex, greed, revenge, murder -- and reality TV

The year is 2012, and as the Most Famous Television Producer in the World is walking down a wintry New York City block, he's accosted by a homeless-looking cripple who, like everyone else, insists he has the formula for the greatest TV show of all time. As it turns out, he does: Contestants will compete for one hundred million dollars. If they win, they're rich. If they lose, they face immediate on-camera execution.

As the Producer begins scheming to steal the idea and revive his fading career, The Big Question introduces the extraordinary characters who will ultimately become the show's contestants -- a brilliantly rendered, Dickensian cast that includes the seventy-something Vera Bundle, with a taste for scotch and encyclopedias; Arthur Durch, a convicted sex offender-turned-relationship therapist; Retta Mae Wagons, a sixteen-year-old prostitute with an IQ of 170 and an ex-con-turned-Muslim fundamentalist boyfriend who doesn't appreciate her; Billy Constable, the Kentucky rube who gets off a bus in New York and promptly finds himself in trouble with the Mob; and Father Brady, the devout Catholic priest with a mortifying secret to hide at any cost. As the first episode is broadcast live in front of millions, the audience, the cast, and the crew behind the scenes do the unthinkable: they sit and watch, rapt and glassy-eyed, as the final contestant left on stage meets an unimaginable fate.

To say The Big Question is a novel of greed and immorality would be putting it lightly. But to read this book without laughing out loud at every page would be impossible. This is more than just a funny book, though. With uncanny precision and razor-sharp wit, the inimitable Chuck Barris reveals the inconceivable lengths to which people will go for those priceless fifteen minutes, the fascination we have with the little black box in our homes -- and the horrifying deeds done in the name of entertainment.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #693781 in Books
• Published on: 2007-05-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 288 pages

From Publishers Weekly
Answer the quiz show's final question correctly, and you win $100 million; get it wrong, and you're executed on live television. The premise is as potentially gruesome and gripping as it is simple, but former Gong Show host and self-proclaimed informant Barris (Confessions of a Dangerous Mind) is more interested in the multiple sad-sack characters who provide myriad digressions than in plot. In 2011, a self-described octogenarian "cripple"—he's never named, but "the movie of the cripple's book, Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, tanked"—is broke in New York, despite a TV heyday that included creating The Dating Game. He hopes to make a comeback by peddling his concept for "The Death Game" to a successful producer. As that plot unfolds, Barris introduces a welter of characters who are more like caricatures, among them widow Vera Bundle of Steubenville, Ohio, 77 and mourning her husband 50 years after his death; prostitute Retta Mae Wagons, the 170 IQ teenage daughter of a junkie; and Billy Constable, 19, late of Bowling Green, Ky., who has come to New York to seek his fortune. These three appear in the deadly broadcast that ends the book, but that's less the point than tuning in to the world according to Barris. (May)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist
Barris, game-show-king-turned-writer, turns in a virtuoso performance in his outrageous new novel. A retired game-show producer is accosted by a grubby old man, who offers to sell him an idea for a new show. In Barris' near-future world, assisted suicide is legal, and in the proposed new show, contestants either win $100 million or are executed on live television. The novel follows the lives of several potential contestants, including a teenage prostitute, an elderly woman, and an ex-con, but what makes the tale so fascinating--some might say warped--is that the grubby old man is none other than a down-and-out Barris himself. As usual, the author of Confessions of a Dangerous Mind (1982) blurs the line between reality and fantasy, making us wonder just what the heck we're supposed to believe. And, while we're pretty sure Barris never produced a pilot for this particular game show, is it so hard to believe, what with the current state of reality TV, that someone might someday put something like this on the air? A darkly satirical, witty, and uncomfortably plausible novel. David Pitt
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Review
"You'll fall in love with Chuck's characters. What a great read!"

-- Dick Ebersol

Customer Reviews

Not a Bad Read, Lots of Eccentric Characters!
The Big Question is a game show which airs in 2011. Contestants compete for the chance to answer a final question which if they answer it correctly will take all their problems away by making them one of the richest people in the world. Downside though is that if they get the question wrong, they are executed in prime time.

The Big Question you start asking yourself as start is why do new characters and their storylines keep getting introduced? As the number of characters grow and we keep jumping back and forth between storylines, and periods of time, it does become a little confusing as to whose life you're reading. However all these storylines do cross paths with one other at some time in the novel, and the majority of these characters want to be contestants in the final chapters when the actual Big Question Game show airs.

The majority of the characters are actually very interesting, as are there life stories. Many of these eccentric characters would not be out of place in a Bill Fitzhugh, Dave Barry or Carl Hiaasen novel. Some are a bit far fetched or a little unbelievable and the predictability of what will happen to them or which other character's storyline they are going to cross is also a factor. The book is a lot of fun though, but the actual percentage of pages revolving around the Big Question (or Death Game as its original creator called the pilot) would be 10% of the book at most.

Other similar death themed reality TV show books you might want to check out are Richard Bachman's (aka Stephen King) The Running Man and also The Long Walk. The Jason Strain by Christa Faust where death row inmates are put Survivor style on an island and have to battle each other to the death (and also surprise guest the captured Jason Vorhees) where the winner is granted life in jail also may appeal to fans of the lethal game show.

The Big Question is an enjoyable book, it basically a heap of different character driven storylines, but their lives are quite interesting to read about.

Not about the game, about the contestants
The Big Question is a plot vehicle to tell the intertwined stories of about a dozen characters who are desperate, unhappy, or just screwed up enough to try out for a game show where they may be killed. Those that meet do so in the green room at the broadcast. None is particularly likeable but many of them have some decent depth written into them.

It's not about the game, it's about the characters from varying walks of life whose lives have little meaning to them. And the ending delivers.

Barris hits a Bull's Eye with this Sharp Satire
There is a lot outrageous humor and genuinely funny moments in Chuck Barris' THE BIG QUESTION, but don't mistake this satirical novel for lightweight entertainment. It is a dark view of American society and human nature using the game show as metaphor. And who better to explore that metaphor than Chuck Barris, one of the great innovators of the game show form. Barris not only knows television, but he also has a gift for creating vivid characters both sympathetic and reprehensible, and THE BIG QUESTION has a big cast. Barris is an author who both entertains and surprises the reader with his deftness in weaving comedy and tragedy together. I found the book to be a compelling page-turner which I could not put down during the final 40 pages as the story came to its shocking conclusion. I read THE BIG QUESTION while on a cruise, so I can highly recommend it as both well-done popular literature and a good vacation read.