The Scripps National Spelling Bee might be the only good thing left in the world.
The Bee is perfect. It’s a place where hard workers, nerds, and misfits come out of their shells. (Or should I say C-H-R-Y-S-A-L-I-D-E-S, chrysalides?) A world in which immigrants become stars. A competition with one champion, but everyone is a winner. It’s work for work’s sake–studying for hours because it’s fun to learn things and to prove to yourself just how much your brain is capable of holding.
With tech companies and corporate overlords increasingly trying to sell us the idea that expending any effort at all is bad, I find a bunch of kids who devote years of their lives to studying something relatively useless to be delightful.
But for something that feels so internal and inherently dull, the National Spelling Bee is also must-see TV. It’s everything we wish reality shows were. Those productions—the vaudeville of our time, really—today involve people crafting a full character before the cameras start rolling, usually playing copies of copies of heroes and villains they’ve seen on previous seasons. The end goal is less to “win” and more to gain social media followers or even their own spinoff; the shows are mostly about the show. Survivor is now 80% people on Survivor talking about how much they love Survivor.
But the Bee? There are no villains. There’s no hidden immunity idols—spell wrong (or, in one section, miss a vocabulary word) and you’re gone. These kids aren’t old enough to create personas. The drama is real, and it is spectacular. Previous bees have had spellers fainting, unintentional comedy routines, and even an eight-way tie (or, as the wordsmiths deemed themselves, “The Octo-Champs.”) There are nepo-spellers. This year, 14-year-old finalist Zwe Spacetime is the younger brother of 2021 Bee winner Zaila Avant-garde. Has any sentence ever been more fun to type?
And the stakes couldn’t be higher. My favorite story involves a speller’s grandfather, who paid 1,000 people in India to pray for his grandson to win. But his grandson did not win! Did someone pay 1,001 people to pray for their grandchild to win?
Full disclosure: I used to write sentences for the National Spelling Bee. Not because I needed the job. It was because I, an adult and full-time television comedy writer, was so obsessed with the National Spelling Bee that I sent the organization an email asking how I could be involved, and they let me write sentences for the broadcast. Basically, contestants can ask for a few things before spelling: definition, part of speech, alternate pronunciations, language of origin, and to have the word used in a sentence. That last part is where I came in.
I sat just off-camera with a writer from “The Simpsons” and, live on television, we crafted sentences like, “Why do hot dogs come in packs of 10, while packages of hot dog buns are octonary?” (Octonary: of or relating to the number eight.) It was maybe the best time I’ve ever had.
What I remember most from the experience wasn’t just how smart these kids are (very smart!). It wasn’t their discipline (very disciplined!). It was how much joy they had spelling (very, very joyful!).
Here’s a little insider secret: after many of the kids got eliminated from the Bee, do you know what some of them did? They got together at night to organize other, smaller spelling bees! Just for funsies. How, I ask HOW, can your heart not burst?
Now I don’t want to put too much pressure on these already-stressed-out young souls, but I’m afraid they are currently my sole hope for humanity. I am rooting for every single last one of the contestants who already got out in the semi-finals to have the time of their lives. I am rooting for William Fuller from Tulsa, Oklahoma, who claims his favorite author is, quote: “The writers of the 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica.” I’m rooting for Louis Avetis, who “can play the piano and harmonica simultaneously.” I’m rooting for Phaneendra Bulusu, who says his favorite word is “Houyhnhnm.” (That’s a fictional race of intelligent horses, of course!)
And speller number 128, Emmalyn Franks? My dear Emmalyn Franks, who I have never met and yet would die for? Well, according to her bio, “She has a collection of emergency emotional support sweaters that she holds very dear to her heart.”
This year almost 250 spellers have been competing for a giant trophy and over $50,000 in cash. The field has been cut to nine ahead of tonight’s finals, which will air at 8 p.m. ET on May 28th on ION and you better believe I’ll be watching. You should be too.
