I know that parents brag about their kids a lot, and a lot of it is overblown and unwarranted, but today I’ve got a legitimate achievement for you. I am willing to bet that my son is the only second grader in the entire state of Louisiana who plays Supermarket Sweep when he’s supposed to be getting ready for school in the morning.

I’ve written before about my love for Pluto TV and their various channels full of old TV shows. If you’re a Pluto viewer, though, and you stick with a single channel long enough, you see the shows start to cycle back to the beginning, so I find that we tend to go through phases. For a while there, whenever we turned on Pluto TV it was to watch I Love Lucy. Then there was a period where we were stuck on the channel with old episodes of Cheers and Frasier. We went through a Top Gear period and a Nick Jr. Channel phase and a nice chunk of time where we watched the old Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood. But in recent weeks we’ve gravitated towards Supermarket Sweep, the old 90s game show where contestants answered trivia questions and played games about groceries and shopping, not to win money, but to win TIME. Then they used that time in a mad dash through the supermarket, trying to grab as much as they could in bonuses and merchandise for the right to play the final $5000 game. If you were around in the first half of the 90s, I’m sure you watched this show. I’m sure you thought about being ON this show. Hell, host David Ruprecht even ENTICED you with it at the end of every episode: “Remember, the next time you’re at the checkout counter and you hear that beep (BEEP BEEP), think of the fun you could have on Supermarket Sweep!”

Such a tease, that David Ruprecht.

Anyway, we can never quite predict which shows Eddie will latch on to, and something about Supermarket Sweep has really captured his attention. He runs around the house, grabbing random items for his “sweep,” and declaring which ones are bonus items and how much the bonuses are worth. Unlike the original sweep, where bonuses were usually worth something between $50 and $300, sometimes Eddie will declare the bonuses his mother and I have won to be worth, and I quote, “ZERO DOLLARS,” followed by an insane giggle. It’s all about the joys of parenting.

Watching this 30-year-old game show is a kind of television comfort food. It’s very low-stress, except when you’ve figured out one of the clues and the contestants haven’t and you’re YELLING at them that they’re supposed to be looking for the FLINTSTONES VITAMINS, NOT THE FRUITY PEBBLES, YOU MORON! At one point, I was writing something on my laptop when my wife shouted “KUDOS!”, and for a moment I thought she was congratulating me before I realized she was referring to a granola bar. Sometimes the answer will be a product neither Erin or I have ever heard of, or sometimes it’ll be something they stopped making 20 years ago and suddenly we find that we miss it. It really tugs on those nostalgic strings. 

There’s also a quaintness to it. For instance, in one game the contestants are presented with three different products and they have to guess which one costs more than, say, $2. And I laugh, because every one of those products would be at least $7 today, and I realize that if I were to go back in time and be a contestant on this show, I would be very, very bad at the pricing games.

There was a revival of Supermarket Sweep a few years ago hosted by Leslie Jones, but it didn’t last. I watched it a couple of times, and it didn’t really get to me the way the old ones do. I feel like modern games shows work really hard to amplify the stakes. Bigger prizes, bigger sets, flashy graphics. I’ve seen shows that literally have an enormous roulette wheel, others where an incorrect answer will have someone ejected into a pool of water…and I still haven’t got the slightest idea what Fox’s The Floor is supposed to be.

Even the old stalwarts have had to change with the times. Wheel of Fortune and Jeopardy both have bigger prizes on the line than they did back in the day, and while part of that can certainly be chalked up to inflation, it also feels like there’s an effort to keep “modernizing” it. Wheel has new types of puzzles than they used to, for instance, with sometimes baffling rules. Jeopardy is still played more or less the way it always has been, but it’s become more attached to the cult of celebrity. It’s been a long time now since they got rid of their five-day limit for returning champions, but in recent years there’s been a push to make “stars” out of any champion who gets on a particularly long winning streak. I get it, it’s playing the media game, but watching these shows today does bring out a thirst for the classics.

A few years back, after Hurricane Ida hit, we were without internet at our house for about a month. Fortunately, we have an antenna, so we weren’t completely cut off from the world around us, but we certainly didn’t want to watch news coverage of the storm 24 hours a day. So my wife and I (this was before Eddie had quite reached the point where he was demanding control over the remote) settled on leaving the TV most of the time on one of the many digital channels that have cropped up since the analog signal was abandoned, one that showed nothing but game show reruns 24 hours a day. There was no Supermarket Sweep there, but we found ourselves reacquainted with old shows like Hollywood Squares, Match Game, and Card Sharks, cycling through the old games and chuckling at the old prizes. 

It’s a similar feeling to watching old sitcoms or science fiction shows, but there’s a strange contradiction when it comes to the stakes. If I’m watching an old episode of Star Trek, there’s a tension there about the fate of the crew of the Starship Enterprise, even though I know for a fact that these are all actors, that nobody was actually hurt in the filming of this episode, and that pretty much everybody not wearing red is guaranteed to be back next week unless their name is Denise Crosby. On the other hand, watching an old game show has none of that tension, even though the people on that show WERE real people and WERE playing for real money and prizes that might have changed their lives. The game shows are less intense for the viewer, even though there is far more at stake for the people involved. It’s such a weird juxtaposition, but it’s true.

I don’t know how long Eddie is going to remain obsessed with Supermarket Sweep. If past performance is any indicator, it will go on until we stumble upon something else, purely by chance, that diverts his attention. It could be a cartoon, could be a sitcom, could be another game show. There’s no telling. But in the meantime, I’m kind of enjoying a virtual run down the aisle, trying to stack up on those big blocks of cheese worth $30 each or grabbing the three items from David Ruprecht’s shopping list for a bonus $250. And when the contestant can’t figure out that the clue is supposed to send them shopping for Aquafresh Toothpaste, I am there to yell the correct answer at the screen, only for Eddie to echo me a moment later. 

It’s not game-changing television. It’s not Squid Game or Yellowstone, it’s not something people will be talking about around the water cooler if people still do that sort of thing. But it’s nice.

Sometimes just nice is okay.

Blake M. Petit is a writer, teacher, and dad from Ama, Louisiana. His most recent writing project is the superhero adventure series Other People’s Heroes: Little Stars, volume one of which is now available on Amazon. You can subscribe to his newsletter by clicking right here. He’s also started putting his LitReel videos on TikTok. Also nice: reruns of The Dating Game that do not involve serial killers. So, that’s at least 75 percent of them.