Fox television competition The Floor contestants hustle for hometown hero status

Courtesy Fox TV

Eric Melin was walking back from dinner in Bray, Ireland, just outside Dublin, when someone behind him said, “I thought you might be here.” The speaker was fellow Kansas Citian Meredith Host. While Melin didn’t know Host (at least not yet), she was familiar with Melin—Ultimate Fakebook musician, former Pitch film critic and competitive air guitar world champion—from his time hosting and participating in U.S. Air Guitar events in Kansas City before he moved to California in 2019.

“I was navigating through the street away from my hotel, and Eric is walking at me, and I’m like, ‘Of course the air guitar champion is here,’” Host says, laughing.

This was no serendipitous townie run-in of the kind that sometimes happens when you’re traveling. The circumstances were kind of extraordinary. Host and Melin were in town because they were both contestants on The Floor, the Rob Lowe-hosted trivia game show broadcast on Fox.

In true Midwesterner fashion, the two quickly decided to be study buddies. “I like being around people and having support and hanging out,” Melin says. “Being in Ireland by myself with a laptop and a bunch of spreadsheets wasn’t fun. It was early in the game, so I was excited to have someone to study with.”

When Melin and Host walked into the contestant meeting on Sunday night, where they officially met the other players, they picked up a third unexpected Kansas City study pal: Dave Elliott.

“I knew of (Melin) from Lawrence in the late 90s,” Elliott, who lives in Olathe, says. “I’d seen Ultimate Fakebook play I don’t know how many times. I saw him talking to someone and I’m like ‘That’s not Dave Grohl. Is that Eric Melin?’ We started talking and instantly hit it off.”

The Floor, based on a Dutch game show of the same name, starts with a pool of competitors (the number varies by season; this time it’s 100 contestants) standing on a grid. Each contestant has an area of trivia expertise and can challenge others to a showdown based on their proximity; a contestant can challenge a rival on the squares immediately in front, behind, or to the left and right of their square. The winner of a given challenge inherits the square of the competitor they’ve defeated. The goal is to take over as much of the board as possible.

“The board is constantly changing, and you think you have a path and know who to avoid, but then by the end of the episode the board looks totally different,” Melin says. “There’s a lot of, ‘I guess I’m gonna be an expert in this now.’”

This season is The Floor’s “season of champions.” All the competitors have previously won something, whether it’s an international air guitar championship (Melin), a cooking championship (Elliott has two national burger championships and a national food championship under his belt) or awards for pottery (Host).

Some of the featured champions have earned some pretty wild titles. “Once you realize people like yo-yo champions and car jitsu champions are there, you go, where’s the air guitar guy?” Melin says (for the record, car jitsu is exactly what it sounds like. It’s jujitsu…in a car).

The Floor’s challenge rounds are visual, with competitors trying to identify the most images in a given challenge category in 45 seconds. The production sent the original list of 100 categories out to competitors a couple of weeks before shooting. Not all the expertise categories match a competitor’s championship title. Melin’s, for example, was “hair metal hits,” which feels apropos for an air guitar god, but others weren’t so cut-and-dried. The season premiere, which aired Sept. 13, featured a Triple Crown-winning horse trainer (Jena Antonucci) whose knowledge area was mini golf.

“You get a list of 100 topics. I was thinking this is no big deal, but I saw the list and got overwhelmed, especially when you don’t know what you’re gonna get,” Host says. “Until you actually show up on the soundstage, you don’t know what you’re gonna be near. Figuring out what to focus your time on, you don’t know until you get there.”

Studying required looking over as many related category images as possible, hoping some of them might appear on the show.

“I basically just made lists,” Host says. “When I realized ‘This is something I should study,’ I’d go in-depth with Google images. I had about 100 Google Drive folders going.”

Once he actually got to the stage, Elliott says, a lot of that knowledge went right out the window, no matter how hard he’d studied. “I’d never done anything to this scale. I’ve done local tv countless times. But when you’re up there, the pressure’s real,” he says. “I understand when people don’t get obvious stuff now.”

Elliott wasn’t the only one who struggled to keep it together when the pressure was on. Host says that reaction was universal. “It’s easy to psych yourself out in a category; we all did,” Host says. “All of these people are winners. They’re very competitive, extremely strategic, extremely focused. It really upped the level of competition. People weren’t making decisions on the fly.”

Of course, as the competition field narrowed, one question loomed: What would happen when you inevitably had to challenge your friend?

“We talked about that,” Elliott says. “There was some point where I knew it was gonna be me, and there was someone off to my side, and I said, ‘I might have to go after you, and if I do, no offense.’ You get close to people when you’re standing next to each other 12 hours a day.”

For Melin, who’s no stranger to televised trivia (he was part of a team on VH1’s World Series of Pop Culture in 2006), the most important thing was to have fun. “I like being around people, and I like being a weirdo; that’s kind of who I am,” Melin says. “It’s like a switch I just have to turn on and then I’m in fun mode. I’m also really competitive. But you’ll see throughout the show that we’re having a lot of fun.”

Host has organized a watch party for the show at Tower Tavern on 31st Street in Martini Corner. This was her first time on a game show, but she says she’s caught the bug.  “It was the most stress I’ve ever felt. But would I do it again? Absolutely,” she says. “I want it so bad. I’m like ‘sign me up.”

The season six premiere of The Floor launched Sept. 13 on Hulu, Apple TV, and Disney +. You can catch the show on Fox on Wednesdays at 7 p.m. CT, and available on streaming the next day starting Sept. 23.