This week’s episode of The Incomparable’s Game Show podcast—its 250th!—also happens to mark the tenth anniversary of my game show, Inconceivable!. In fact, we recorded this episode ten years to the day of the first episode’s release, which was also, coincidentally, the first episode of Game Show. Fun how that all works out.
To celebrate, I assembled the six most frequent panelists on the show—Steve Lutz (15 appearances, including this episode), Erika Ensign (15), Liz Myles (13), Kathy Campbell (12), and Tony Sindelar (12)—who were gracious enough to lend their time while not letting the momentousness of the occasion preempt them from indulging in the time-honored pastime of heckling the host.1
More than any of my shows, this one is a labor of love—emphasis, perhaps, on labor. It takes a lot of work to construct the rounds and to make sure that the answers are both achievable and not too easy (a sentiment that my panelists may not agree with). I’ve been lucky enough to get contributions from a number of friends and listeners over the years, which has made my life considerably easier, but I generally still write the bulk of the shows myself.
Still, as someone pointed out when I first remarked upon this milestone, I originally had the lofty goal of producing one episode per month of the show, a pace that quickly proved itself unsustainable. (Had I tried, we’d now be celebrating episode 120 of the show and I would probably be dead.) Instead, we’ve averaged 3-4 episodes a year, albeit with some bigger gaps here and there. Not too shabby.
Sporadic as it may be, I continue to love doing this show and intend for it to continue for the foreseeable future, though I’m not going to unwisely promise any change in our release schedule. I’d like to sent heartfelt thanks to all of my panelists over the years (51 of them, by my count!) as well as my dedicated scorekeeper Lex Friedman and his occasional substitutes—Jason Snell, Tony Sindelar, and Glenn Fleishman—who have all generously stepped into that role when called upon. I also want to credit listener and unofficial Incomparable Archivist Spol for his work in tracking the show’s history on our periodically updated wiki.
Inconceivable! means a lot to me; below I’m reprinting the blog post I published when it debuted, and I especially want to once again highlight the influence of the radio quiz show Says You!, which finally wrapped up in 2023 after an amazing 26-year run. Since I wrote that post, which was also shortly after Says You! creator and host Richard Sher passed away, we’ve lost a couple of the other contributors to the show, including long-time panelist Arnie Reisman in 2021 and, more recently, occasional panelist Flash Wiley. I’m not really sure if we’ll ever see the likes of the show again2, though I hope Inconceivable! keeps its spirit alive in some small way. And a final thanks to all of you who have listened and supported the show throughout the years—I’m so glad you enjoy it, and I hope it continues to bring you some joy and some laughs throughout times good and bad.
Inconceivable!
(Originally published February 13, 2015).
This is a special one. I’ve always loved game shows, especially ones that involve puzzles or trivia. As a kid, I loved watching Jeopardy! at my grandmother’s house, and I’ve been to several recordings of shows like Wait Wait… Don’t Tell Me!. A couple years ago, I even fulfilled a dream by appearing as a contestant on a show, NPR’s Ask Me Another. And over on The Incomparable, we’ve done a couple game show episodes in which I took part.
But I’ve also long wanted to host a show, and after years of vaguely mentioning ideas about it to my partner-in-crime Jason Snell, I finally got off my keister and sat down to write and organize one. You now have it before you, in the form of Inconceivable!, the first episode of which aired earlier this week. I describe it as a game of nerdery and nonsense, in which two teams compete to demonstrate their knowledge of obscure and useless details about things like comic books, sci-fi and fantasy, gaming, and more. (Like all good panel shows, however, that is merely a thin veneer—an excuse for people to get together, joke, and laugh.)
Writing the show ended up being less harrowing and way more fun than I’d worried. I concocted five rounds, with everything ranging from identifying terms from franchises like Star Trek, Star Wars, and Harry Potter to figuring out mashed-up movies from their combined plots. Every time I re-read my questions in the days leading up to the recording session, I found myself thinking alternately “These are too hard! Nobody’s going to figure these out!” and “These are way too easy! This isn’t a challenge at all!” Which makes me think that their difficulty was just about right. A big part of the fun in shows like these is listening to the panel try to figure out the answer (and, naturally, coming up with hilarious-if-incorrect explanations along the way).
I was a bit anxious leading up to our recording session, but it went spectacularly well, thanks in no small part to my fantastic panel of veteran Incomparable participants: Scott McNulty, Georgia Dow, Lisa Schmeiser, Tony Sindelar, Erika Ensign, and, of course, Jason Snell himself. None hesitated to embrace the spirit of the game, diving in headfirst, and a lot of fun was had. Special thanks as well to my good friend Lex Friedman, who served as the scorekeeper and announcer. (Which I did indeed pitch to him as being the Carl Kasell to my Peter Sagal).
I’m now in the process of writing episode two, which will hopefully record in the next few weeks. The panel will probably rotate a bit over the next few episodes, though I expect a lot of the existing panelists to recur—I’d like to eventually create a regular pool, because what I love about so many of these shows is the camaraderie that builds up amongst the participants over time.
But the launch of this show is a bit bittersweet for me. Perhaps the biggest influence for Inconceivable! was a radio show called Says You!. Most people haven’t really heard of it; it’s somewhat less prominent than Wait Wait and Ask Me Another, but it’s been running since 1996, during which it’s basically had the same panel. (Most of them were Boston-based media personalities when they started, and I believe it began airing locally in Boston first.)
Says You! revolves around wordplay, with the teams competing to figure out the derivation of popular phrases, figure out the definitions of obscure words, and, yes, decrypt mashed-up movie titles and books. But what I love about is how much fun they always seem to have.
I used to listen to the show with my folks when I was younger and I’ve been to a half dozen tapings since 2003, most recently this past January. (It was one of the major impetuses to getting me to sit down and finally write Inconceivable!) If you’ve never listened, it’s well worth your time, though you can only catch it on the radio when it airs or by buying specific shows from their store. (Now is the point where I admit my not-so-secret aspiration has long been to be a panelist on the show.)
The day after the first episode of Inconceivable! aired—in fact, right as we were in the middle of recording our marathon Star Wars: Episode III show for The Incomparable—I saw that Richard Sher, the host, writer, and producer of Says You!, had passed away after a battle with cancer. I found myself a bit blindsided—I’d seen him perform just last month, and though I’d never met him personally, Richard’s been a part of my life for well over a decade. Every week, he and the rest of the panel came into our living room or kitchen, as much a part of our evening as anybody sitting around the dinner table. My family refers to him by first name. Even now, I can hear his deep, somewhat raspy voice in my head.
I don’t expect that Richard would ever have had reason to hear Inconceivable!, but I hope that if he had he would have been pleased and flattered. To put it bluntly, Inconceivable! wouldn’t have existed without Says You, and I hope that in some small way it lives up to that august standard—I consider it a loving homage to the show that I’ve enjoyed for more than fifteen years.
Says You will, apparently, go on without Richard’s presence, though it will of course never be quite the same. But I just wanted to take a moment to acknowledge everything Richard Sher brought to my life, from the bluff and bluster to the words and whimsy. And if the show I’ve created can bring even a fraction of the joy and laughter that Says You brought me, well, that’s the best way I can think of to honor his memory.
Thank you, Richard.