Mistaken “Identity�

There are times during the holiday season when Your Mayor, bewilderingly incapable of enjoying the barrages of holiday goodwill currently besieging our country, experiences moments of self-destructiveness. Happily, NBC is enabling me this season with a full pre-holiday week of a new, agonizingly idiotic game show entitled “Identity.� I can watch this instead of getting into cutting.

Penn Jillette (the bad-boy magician who appears to have clipped and removed the black polish from his elongated pinkie fingernail in order to appear more palatable to game-show America, perhaps not the smartest career choice) hosts this thing that is, in every significant way, a dumber rip-off of “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire.� More oddly, in the episode made available for review, Penn didn’t offer up one wisecrack.

Here, a dozen “strangers� stand atop pedestals on a stage. Contestants must match them up with biographical thumbnail sketches such as “Sushi Chef� or “CSI Investigator� or “Bouncer� or “Opera Singer.� The strangers' clothing provides visual clues (for example, in a future episode, the “youngest� wears a Catholic-schoolgirl uniform; a “fitness model� is clad only in a bikini; a “breakdancer� is decked out in hip-hop attire; a serial killer is drenched in blood - well, technically, I didn't see the last one personally, but given the subtlety this show trucks in, it's no doubt in another episode).

Like “Millionaire,� “Identity� is awash in melodramatic music, hyperbolic light shows and enough padding to stretch about 10 minutes of actual material to a poky 60 minutes. Instead of “Millionaire’s� “final answer,� “Identity� contestants must “seal� their guesses. (Like “Deal or No Deal,� “Identity� is based on guessing, not actual knowledge.) “Identity� also has its thinly veiled version of lifelines. The main difference is that here, contestants can only win only $500,000, not a million. But then, that’s an awful lot of money for not really having to know anything.

This new breed of game show seems determined mainly not to challenge the viewer in any way imaginable; they’re video wallpaper for people to zone out to. Seems like viewers need to do an awful lot of zoning out these days.

- “Identity:� 9 tonight (8 Central); 8 p.m. Tuesday-Friday (7 central) on NBC (Channel 4 in L.A.).