Mounting a game show with winners and losers to highlight the inequities of education economics is “a weird space,” Torpey said. And he milks the weirdness for all its worth. In the season’s second episode, the runner-up says goodbye to the audience by putting a green oven mitt on his right hand and following instructions to flick off Congress. The young man obliges and holds up the mitt. “You know what he’s doing under there!” Torpey says, as the audience laughs and applauds. “You know what he’s doing!”

In the past decade, total student loans have more than doubled from about $600 billion to nearly $1.4 trillion. It is a uniquely American problem. In several European countries—including Germany, Finland, and Norway—public institutions offer free tuition. In Canada and Japan, the annual cost of a year’s education at a public college or university is at least 50 percent less than in the United States. In the worst cases, poorly regulated for-profit institutions hoovered up student loans in exchange for an “education” that empirically offered no average benefit to students. But even in the best cases—college is, historically and overall, a profitable investment—student debt is rising faster than graduate wages.

But national attention to the issue has been inconsistent. Torpey acknowledged that the show stands on the shoulders of the Occupy movement, which yelled, marched, and camped under banners of startling statistics about student debt. In 2016, Senator Bernie Sanders made “free college” a core part of his campaign platform. But Donald Trump’s scandals, and a steadily improving economy, have more recently diverted attention from the issue.

The show craftily skewers the system that lured its contestants into debt, intermixing questions about Beyoncé and condoms with earnest facts about the moral blight of for-profit colleges. But despite its good intentions, Paid Off accidentally provides a glitzy simulation of the labor market. Onstage and off, individuals use their knowledge and skills to compete for income against their peers, and the winnings are fundamentally scarce, if not zero-sum.

The program implicitly punishes people with lower debt burdens. On Paid Off, the contestants carry debt ranging from several thousand dollars to tens of thousands of dollars. In the final round, winners can receive a check equal to their total debt burden. This means that a contestant fresh out of law school with $40,000 in debt can earn an order of magnitude more from the show than a community-college graduate with just $4,000 in debt.

In fact, that’s just how the economy works. Borrowers with more than $40,000 default account for just 4 percent of those in default, in part because they’ve often accumulated that debt through graduate programs that deliver a reasonably high level of income. But borrowers with less than $5,000 in debt default are far more likely to default, because they’ve often attended a less-prestigious school or dropped out of college entirely, accumulating debt without increasing their earning potential.

These might be pedantic criticisms. It’s a television show, after all, not the theatrical rendition of a Brookings white paper to resolve the politics of student debt. But in 2018 America, TV entertainment is politics by other means. The president is a ratings hound who considers the gravest responsibilities of his office to be irresistible opportunities to monopolize the nation’s prime-time attention. Meanwhile, outrage seeps through the pores of talk-show hosts, and award-show emcees, and sketch shows, and stand-up comics, not to mention the most explicitly political performances on cable news.