Roger Lodge vs. Jeff Probst
Battle of the Tiresome Talking Heads

Some Personalities are celebrities that have fallen on hard times; Joan Rivers comes to mind as an example of this career decline. Some Personalities have inexplicably entered the public consciousness and ensconced themselves there, despite their utter lack of special talents; Darva Conger, I'm looking in your direction. Perhaps saddest of all are those Personalities that have entered the few career fields that, by their very nature, ensure that their practitioners will start and end as Personalities, and that no matter what they do, they simply will never amount to anything more; we're thinking now of small-town news anchors, TV chefs, and game-show hosts.

The recent success of two game shows in particular has made it clear that their hosts are really duplicating one another's...uh..."skill sets"; these would be Survivor's Jeff Probst, and Blind Date's Roger Lodge. (Okay, BD isn't, strictly speaking, a game show, but it does feature adults humiliating themselves in front of the camera in pursuit of an illusory reward, so we think it's fair to place it in the same class as Let's Make a Deal or The Price is Right.)

To the untrained eye, it would appear that Jeff can win this race at a walk, given the fact that the show to which he is attached is so phenomenally popular that entire news articles in legitimate papers are devoted to its plot line. The problem is that Jeff is, without a doubt, the worst thing about Survivor. His appearance on the scene, clad in a safari outfit stolen from one of the hosts at Walt Disney World's Jungle Cruise attraction, is the viewer's cue to go get some chips; Jeff is either there to deliver some laboured description of the Survivors' imminent challenge, or he's delivering the bad news that Jenna will not be seeing a video of her children. In the series' later episodes, the bad news Jeff was required to deliver was that part of the Survivor's "reward" would be forced socializing with Jeff himself -- such as Sean's dinner with Jeff on the Visa yacht, or Kelly's trip to a "bar" on a soundstage, accompanied by Jeff. The latter of these was possibly the nadir of Jeff's time on the island; his inability to meet Kelly's eye as she spoke to him left the viewer with the unsettled impression that Susan was about to walk in and punch Kelly in the nose, and his awkward attempts to engage Kelly in casual conversation demonstrated to the audience that he is not in the practice of speaking to anyone without the benefit of a script.

On the other hand, Roger Lodge acts as the Blind Date viewer's surrogate. A graduate of the Casey Kasem school of broadcasting, Roger (in the studio) is never entirely convincing in the gentle ribbing he gives the show's (filmed) participants, but at least he is slagging them off for us, and taking as much delight in a clueless gent's effusive praise of his date (even as she asserts that she will never see him again) as we at home do. Sure, Roger generally hopes for "better luck next time" after a catastrophic match...but we can tell he doesn't really mean it, and we love him for it.

The bottom line is that Survivor would be just as good -- better, in fact -- without Jeff's constant interjections. But Blind Date needs Roger to tie up all the loose threads, and say those things aloud -- albeit in a sanitized forms -- that we guilty viewers are thinking, and thus, he is indispensable.

Advantage: Roger Lodge.