Travis Kelce might be one of our last remaining Renaissance men. He’s a football player, a clothes horse, boyfriend to a pop star, brother to a podcast host, and now he’s broken through to the silver screen—not on the field, but on the soundstage.
He was one of the high-profile stars cast in Ryan Murphy’s latest horror affliction Grotesquerie, but has so far only appeared in one episode. Maybe that’s because he was having too much fun shooting Prime Video’s Are You Smarter Than a Celebrity?, a spin-off of the game show Are You Smarter Than a Fifth Grader? premiering Oct. 16. Considering all the clapping and cheering going on, that could well be true.
Far from a simple stunt cameo, Kelce is the host of this new iteration of the quiz show, which, in this case, pits one contestant against a “classroom” of famous people—anyone from football players to comedians to football players to the occasional reality star (Vanderpump Rules’ Lala Kent bravely attempts a couple of grade-school trivia questions in one episode). The class is presented with 10 questions from grade levels one through five, and the normie contestant picks one celebrity to assist them in each round. If they ace all 10, they get the option to attempt a sixth-grade-level question or leave with their cash winnings. If they fail any question before that, they flunk out.
Since this version doesn’t involve anyone under the age of 25, little attempt is made to evoke the stickers-and-chalkboards environment of the original show. There’s an anonymous aura to the set design, which looks more like a late-night talk-show stage than a quiz game. It stands to reason: This isn’t Jeopardy! or Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?, where the questions are difficult by design, but something is lost in focusing only on adults.
The fun of the original format was twofold—the joy of watching grown people struggle with questions schoolchildren know by heart, and of watching little kids get to clown on grown people when they get the questions wrong. The excitement, in that case, comes from not wanting to make a fool of yourself in front of a bunch of children. In the Celebrity version, the celebrities themselves jovially admit to being unsure of all of their answers, regaling the audience with stories of sleeping in class or browsing CliffsNotes instead of doing the reading.
That’s the problem at the heart of Are You Smarter Than a Celebrity? It’s too nicey-nicey for a quiz show, with none of the gimmickry of past iterations. There are stakes, but they’re continuously downplayed, with Kelce and his celebrity class assuring their contestants that they’re there to help them win “guaranteed money.” Kelce essentially plays himself, sporting simple suits of different colors over T-shirts, swaying from foot to foot at the center of the stage and clapping. There’s so much clapping, from the audience, from the host, and from the contestants, that if you cut it from the episodes entirely they’d probably be half as long.
None of this is to say that the show is bad. There’s just not much to it aside from the bare bones of a previous format. You either have to be really into watching Ron Funches and Nikki Glaser riff, or really interested to see Travis Kelce attempting to host a game show.
Kelce himself is remarkably good at the gig, clearly comfortable on stage and quick with witty asides to keep things moving when contestants get decision paralysis. When one contestant promised to use her winnings to pay for a BBL, Kelce nobly insisted he didn’t know what that was. And he never misses an opportunity to get a little goofy with it, bounding around to hoots and hollers from the audience whenever the vibe gets stale.
If you’ve seen any of the paparazzi surveillance videos of him and Taylor Swift dancing at football games, you get it. Whenever Kelce decides that his time on the field is over, he could certainly make it as a low-stakes game-show host. But he won’t be taking over from Ken Jennings any time soon.
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