• by Adam Buckman , Featured Columnist, March 8, 2022

A new Fox competition show premiering Wednesday features people who take hours to build the world’s most complex domino formations only to knock them down right after putting them up.

The show -- “Domino Masters” -- is hands down the best domino-toppling show that has ever aired. It is also the only one.

In this one-hour show, three-member teams of domino-toppling enthusiasts will each construct elaborate, complex domino layouts according to a theme that will change each week.

In the series’ premiere previewed by the TV Blog, four teams took up the subject of sports to build chain-reaction “machines” inspired by baseball, football, ice hockey and miniature golf.

In the show’s introductory remarks given by master of ceremonies Eric Stonestreet (formerly seen in the GOAT sitcom “Modern Family”), these complicated assemblages are described as “Rube Goldberg machines.”

This had me wondering how many people today -- including those who might sample this show -- even know who Rube Goldberg was.

On that subject, a quick summary: Reuben “Rube” Garrett Lucius Goldberg (1883-1970) was primarily a cartoonist. He is so revered in the cartooning world that the National Cartoonists Society named their annual prizes after him -- the Reuben Awards.

He became famous for his cartoon drawings of ridiculous chain-reaction constructions. These would be things like a boot swinging on a rope colliding with a bucket of water that would spill on something else and then that thing would crash into another thing, until this whole series of actions and reactions played themselves out.

Whether the multitudes today know who Rube Goldberg was, invoking his name to describe the domino formations on “Domino Masters” is highly appropriate.

They too depend on setting up and then carrying out a series of unlikely and imaginative chain reactions that will feature a number of non-domino objects all positioned to knock down hundreds of dominos all the way to a grand finale.

On the show, the Rube Goldberg-esque knocking down of these domino builds is judged by a three-member panel -- Steve Price, a domino-toppler who is worshiped in the domino-toppling community; former Pro Bowl NFL-er Vernon Davis; and former child star Danica McKellar. 

She is in the show because in addition to acting, she has a side career as an author of math books.

Most of the contestants in “Domino Masters” possess similarly impressive educational and career backgrounds in engineering and various sciences. One of the teams is actually made up of rocket scientists.

Please note that the rectangular objects used by the thousands on the show are not really dominos in the sense that they are not ivory-colored and they have no domino dots on them.

But by all appearances, these multicolor stand-ins look like they accurately approximate the shape, size and weight of real dominos. 

As for the show, it presents the painstaking construction of these domino machines and then their destruction in an over-the-top manner that would make P.T. Barnum proud.

“Domino Masters” premieres on Wednesday (March 9) at 9 p.m. Eastern on Fox.