So Much for That!

The dryer behind door number two has never been selected.

The show is called So Much for That! and the goal is to figure out how much something behind a door might cost. If you can guess what the mystery item costs, you can keep it. First, however, you have to choose a door, and there are twenty-seven doors.

When the show was first pitched to the network executives, they thought it was far too complicated and utterly chaotic. Guessing the sale price of something without knowing what it is? What skill is there in that? Even a surplus of luck would seem to fail in a scenario when you could be guessing the value of a llama or a box of cereal.

It turns out that the madness was catnip for viewers, and So Much for That! was an instant hit for the network, where it proceeded to air on Friday nights for nearly eighteen years, and is currently still a top ten hit, even though ratings are compromised due to the popularity of streamers.

And people won.

Not often, but they won.

One man correctly guessed the price of a poster from Duran Duran’s first tour, and she was very excited, as she was Duran Duran’s number one fan.

Coincidences like that would happen frequently whenever someone won, leading the show to become an even greater topic of cultural conversation. People who had always wanted to cook would receive cooking lessons. People who were newly divorced received consultations with matchmakers. A man with a parrot won extra-sturdy shoulder pads and an eye patch, and he went off to become a pirate on the open seas.

Over the years, every door was selected multiple times, but never Door #2. The producers found it curious, but it wasn’t something that concerned them greatly, as they also had to deal with a succession of revolving hosts, when one after the other revealed themselves to be lizards from other planets attempting to infiltrate humankind by hosting game shows. No matter how pleasant or charming a host would seem, inevitably, someone would snap a photo of them on a bog somewhere, eating flies and shedding their skin.

Nobody said keeping a television show afloat would be easy.

Because nobody ever chose Door #2, nobody bothered to replace the prize behind it, which is how a decades-old dryer continued to sit behind the faded red door. Its soul was the soul of an appliance, and so while it was not exactly lonely, it did feel bad not being of use.

On filming days, it could sense the static in the oxygen. Studio lights warming up the building. The snap of clipboards as sheets were pulled out, signed, and put back. Shuffling of feet as audience members took their seats. The applause when someone would guess correctly. The audible sympathy when they’d fail to guess that behind Door #14 was a glass vase filled with popcorn.

(With no popcorn in the vase, their guess would have been correct, but the popcorn added a small amount of value to the prize, and all guesses had to be right down to the penny.)

Being so close to so much excitement without ever being able to immerse oneself in the fervor was a special kind of sadness dreamt up by someone who does not care for dryers, and there was talk at one point of moving the dryer behind another door, but one of the producers was superstitious and thought that perhaps there was something to Door #2 and the dryer behind it never being chosen. Once that was suggested, no one dare transfer the dryer, and so it collected dust until a Primetime Special went live on a Friday evening in May wherein a woman from Lansing asked to guess the price of whatever was behind the door that gone unnoticed for so long, the number two had fallen off of it completely and never been replaced.

“I’m sorry,” said the host, Johanna D. Reptilio, ironically, not an alien lizard, “Did you say you wanted to guess the price of the item or items behind...Door #2?”

The woman, Estelle, who, oddly enough, was an alien, but not a lizard, just a simple Martian, confirmed that she did indeed want to guess the price of the item behind the never-chosen door, because she had the ability to see beyond the door and was in desperate need of an older dryer to match her older washer, because Martians never enjoy owning anything new. Being able to see the appliance was not the result of magical Martian sight, but new x-ray glasses Estelle had recently received after winning a contest the CIA was holding to try and drum up more recruitment into their sci-ops program. If you sent in a photo of yourself looking like an alien, you were entered to win a pair of x-ray glasses and a one-year subscription to Good Housekeeping magazine. Estelle won the contest, felt a unique sensation of human luck washing over her, and decided to try her luck at America’s hardest game show.

There she was in the audience when her name was called, and when Johanna D. Reptilio put the microphone in front of her face and asked which door she wanted, she knew exactly which one had the prize she was looking for and how much it would cost her.

When Estelle won the dryer, the audience gave their standard whoop of joy and then an audible “Hmm” of confusion when the prize was revealed, because who on earth would want a broken-down dryer? Luckily, Estelle the Lucky Martian was not of the earth, and so she was very happy to walk through Door #2 and claim the lonely dryer.

As she wrapped her arms around it, the dryer did its best to communicate that it was very glad to be going home with someone after all those years hearing other prizes be claimed by lucky people like Estelle.

Several hours later, the dryer was placed lovingly in Estelle’s basement, and it realized it would need to get used to so much quiet and its new colleague, the broken-down washer.

That first night, it rumbled softly, eradicating the moisture in its first batch of laundry, but not well, because, again, it was a very old dryer.

Without meaning to, it began to hum the theme song to So Much for That! and it wondered what was behind Door #2 now.

And whether anybody would ever be able to guess its worth.