“My wife and I struggled with student debt and could only pay it off because — true story — I booked an underpants commercial.”
That’s how Michael Torpey, best known for his portrayal of Thomas Humphrey in the Netflix NFLX, +2.47%[1] show “Orange Is the New Black,” begins the pilot episode of his latest project: a comedy game show where the prize is paying off your student loans.
If you did a double take at that concept (and the underwear story), then Torpey has achieved his goal. “That’s the point of the show,” Torpey, 38, said, “to be so stupid that the people in power look at it and say, ‘That guy is making us look like a bunch of dum dums, we’ve got to go do something about this.’”
Torpey’s show, “Paid Off,”[2] which premieres July 10 on TruTV, is just the latest evidence that student debt is now “part of the popular zeitgeist,” said Mark Huelsman, a senior policy analyst at Demos, a left-leaning think tank. “This is a problem that a lot of people can relate to,” he said.
“Paid Off” is likely the first pop culture phenomenon where student debt isn’t just an ancillary plot line, but at the center of the action. Its existence is evidence of how large our student loan problem has grown over the past several years, Huelsman said. Given how common student debt has become, Torpey said he’s hopeful his game show will convince more people to talk about the challenges they face dealing with it. At the beginning of each show, contestants introduce themselves by sharing their debt burden and their major, among other information.
“This game show couldn’t have happened 20 years ago, it would have made no sense for a previous generation,” Huelsman said. “It wasn’t the part of everyday life that it is now.”
And indeed with more than 40 million Americans coping with more than $1.5 trillion[3] in student loans, it’s no wonder that authors, screenwriters, politicians and others see student debt as fodder for reaching a wide swath of the country.
The most recent novel from famed author Jonathan Franzen, “Purity,” focused on a young woman coping with her student loans. Comedy streaming network, Seeso, debuted “Shrink”[4] last year, which follows a doctor with more than $500,000 in student debt who fails to find a residency.
And when athletes, MacArthur “geniuses”[5], politicians[6] and others come into a big payday, their experience with student loans is one of the first topics broached.
How the game works
In the show, three contestants compete in three rounds of trivia: one academic, one “Family Feud”-style poll with questions about college life...