Posted by Andrew Unterberger on 09/22/2011 at 4:12 PM News

The Popdust Files: cw, musical chairs

To be fair, musical chairs is possibly the most underrated childhood game yet to receive its own TV show. It has just about everything you could want in a kids’ game: Suspense, music, sexual friction and walking in circles, plus it can be played in any space with an abundance of identical chairs and an open diameter of about 10-15 feet. When you think back on your 40 best memories from the ages of 5 to 12, somewhere between six and eight of them are probably musical-chairs-related. That’s a better percentage than Duck Duck Goose, Wall Ball and 500, though it still loses out to Four Square. (No shame in getting beaten by the best.)

Anyway, the CW has noted the untapped televisual potential of musical chairs (which you can see the definitive picture of on the game’s Wikipedia page), and has decided to take advantage of the gap in the marketplace thusly. The new show will be entitled Extreme Musical Chairs and will be exactly like Extreme Makeover: Home Edition, except instead of people renovating homes, they’ll be walking in a circle around some chairs. Well, maybe not exactly: Variety reports that EMC will be keyed around “a physically demanding competition with multiple rounds of elimination set in an indoor obstacle course.” So musical chairs, with falling rocks and trap doors added for a little spice? Works for us.

“I saw my seven-year-old playing this game at a birthday party,” CW president Mark Pedowitz did not say about the inspiration behind the show. “I asked him: ‘What is that crazy game you kids are playing with all that music and excitement and intrigue?’ And he responded. ‘It’s called [Musical] chairs, daddy. All the kids in Ms. Doyle’s class are playing it. I wanna have it at my birthday party!’ And that’s when I thought: We have got to get this on the air.”

No word on who will be hosting the show yet, though it will definitely be one of the following: Ke$ha, Mark Hoppus, Kevin Hart, or Adrien Grenier (as Vincent Chase from Entourage). Our money’s on Ke$ha.

[Vulture]