Topics Penn & Teller and Adam Conover should have covered

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Has anyone else here ever watched Showtime's Penn & Teller: BS? Or TruTv's Adam Ruins Everything?





They were similar shows with the same basic premise: debunking social misconceptions, faulty logic, and general nonsense prevalent in everyday life. Penn & Teller's performance was much more vulgar, but I found it better researched than Adam's. That was an advantage of having a narrower format and a better research team. Plus, I loved the fact that P&T was uncensored!

I thought it was a bummer when Showtime canceled their show in 2010. I would have hoped they would have gone on for another season or two and concluded by calling BS on their own series. They did go on to do a mini-series for Discovery Channel, Penn & Teller: Tell a Lie.

The duo talked about bringing back BS in 2013, but such a notion never materialized.

Adam Conover took over from where Penn & Teller left off years before. His show was broader, more lighthearted, and more cleaned up compared to P&T. Adam's show had a lot of skits as well as expert guests, but I don't think he hit the nail on the head as well as P&T. Like P&T, I would have hope his show would have continued longer before TruTv canned him in 2019. At least he got to do a series finale and called BS on himself!

While these shows are long gone, I think about topics they should have covered. What about you? What issues do you think they should have covered but never did?

Here are my lists:

Topics Penn & Teller should have covered (but Adam did):

1. Airport Security (Penn wanted to do this topic, but airport security laws made filming too tricky)
2. Gratuity/Tipping
3. Voting
4. The Film Industry
5. Holidays (especially Halloween and Christmas)
6. Malls
7. Weddings
8. The Internet
9. Nature
10. The Olympic Games
11. The Police (although P&T did do an episode on criminal justice)
12. Themselves

Topics Adam should have covered (but P&T did):

1. Apocalypticism/Doomsday Prepping
2. Vaccinations
3. Creationism
4. ESP
5. Capital Punishment/The Death Penalty
6. New Age Medicine
7. PETA
8. Ghost Hunting
9. Boy Scouts
10. Cryptozoology
11. Nostalgia/The Good Old Days
12. Fast Food
13. Martial Arts
14. Area 51
15. Stranger Danger
16. Alien Abduction Claims

Topics that both shows should have covered (but neither did):

1. Scientology
2. Corporal Punishment/Spanking
3. Veganism
4. Reincarnation Claims
5. Holocaust Denial
6. The School System
7. Parenting
8. Conscription
9. Faith Healing
10. Leaving Home
11. Life
12. Patriotism
13. Thanksgiving (Adam's gun control episode had a Thanksgiving theme, but his show largely left Turkey Day alone)
14. Karma (Good & Bad)
15. Luck (Good & Bad)
16. Free Will


Aside from topics that Adam and P&T should have covered, what do you think of their shows? How do you like their brands of edutainment?

I also like Penn & Teller’s TV show “Fool Us.”

Alright, one possibility:

1) Okay, the whole thing with the Fermi Paradox — “If the Milky Way Galaxy is teeming with extraterrestrial life, then where the heck is everybody?”

However, I’ve read even if there was an Earth-like planet at orbiting the Alpha Centauri system 4 light years away, with the same TV and radio leakage as Earth, we wouldn’t be able to detect it.

Meaning, all our SETI has been looking for beacon signals, targeted broadcasts, and so forth. And probably not able to pick up leakage.

About active SETI:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/METI_(Mes ... telligence)

“On October 16, 17, and 18, 2017, [non-profit METI] sent a message consisting of a scientific and mathematical tutorial to the red dwarf Luyten's Star, just over 12 light years from Earth. The message was sent from a radio transmitter at the EISCAT research facility in Tromsø, Norway.”

David Brin wrote: “whether small groups of zealots should bypass all institutions, peer critique, risk appraisal or public opinion, to shout ‘yoohoo’ into a potentially hazardous cosmos. Ćirković's book offers plenty of grist for discussion and consensus-seeking, before rushing to force a fait accompli on our children.”

So, tension the hell out of all these ideas. Should make for a very meaty and substantial 45 minutes of television.

Little green people who have radio and TV on a planet around Alpha Centauri would indeed be able to pick up our commercial radio and TV broadcasts. But all such leakage would be static. They wouldnt be able to see the content of the programs. Planets 80 light years away are just now receiving Milton Berle's Westinghouse hour on TV. But beyond two light years it turned to static. So even the four light years away Alpha Centaurians cant actually "watch our TV shows". But they would know that a radio capable species lived here. Thats what I read.