Adam Ruins Everything (Season 2, Episode 8: Emily Ruins Adam): featuring a good demolition job on IQ tests

Laura Murphy, “Adam Ruins Everything (Season 2, Episode 8: Emily Ruins Adam)” (2017)

At long last, for those who always wanted to get their back on comedian Adam Conover for gatecrashing everyone’s parties to tell people that everything they thought they knew was right about everyday facts is actually wrong … here comes an episode of “Adam Ruins Everything” in which one of Adam’s past companions Emily sets about demolishing IQ tests and a few investigations from previous episodes that the TV show either got wrong or didn’t make clear to viewers. The segment on IQ testing and how IQ tests have been abused by US federal government agencies in often sinister ways – for example, to select people judged mentally defective or racially inferior for sterilisation as part of a wider but hidden eugenics program – is the most interesting part of the episode. The segments that follow are less informative and more slapstick as Emily and Adam overdo their comedy routine, particularly in the boxing ring segment where Emily tells Adam that simply telling people that what they believe is right is actually wrong isn’t enough to change their minds … what also should be done is to replace the incorrect narrative with a narrative that is as close to the truth as possible.

Even so, the episode as a whole is worthwhile mainly to show that even a television show with the resources to hire the best experts and to do thorough research doesn’t always get its facts right, or needs to do more work to convince or persuade viewers that its viewpoint is more valid than others. It’s a reminder that we should be humble about what we know or think we know, and there are going to be times when we ourselves need to review our own narratives about how the world works or what makes it go round.

The segment on IQ tests is very informative though perhaps it does not go deeply enough to encompass a whole sordid history of how the US government over past decades targeted racial minorities and immigrants and shunted them into the lowest socio-economic layers by subjecting them to biased intelligence testing, or subjected them to unethical medical experiments and sterilisation programs. That awaits a much fuller treatment by a television program with even more resources and access to experts and historians.