Penn & Teller: Bullshit!



Penn & Teller: Bullshit! was a TV infotainment show in which a wide range of topics were investigated and debunked. The show ran for eight seasons starting in 2003 and ending in 2010. As the name suggests, it featured magicians Penn & Teller.

Covered topics of interest to skeptics and rationalists included religions, cults, New Age, alternative medicine, conspiracy theories, the anti-vaccination movement, and so on.

Unfortunately a number of episodes are bullshit themselves and veer off into pseudoscepticism and denialism, making the show as a whole a bit of a paradoxical combination of stopped clock and inverse stopped clock. Generally speaking, the show's coverage of woo and general crankery is pretty good, while episodes that deal with social trends, politics, environmentalism, and economics vary in quality — in no small part due to the then pretty strong libertarian beliefs of Penn & Teller.

We keep articles on most, if not all, topics they cover. Many of the episodes are educational, and — if nothing else — humorous to watch if you have about a half an hour to kill, and several of the episodes have grown to become classics within the skeptical community.

It is like a more profane, less broad version of Adam Ruins Everything.

Bullshit on Bullshit!
You know, we first started doing Bullshit!—I say with a great deal of shame, that I pitched it a little cynical. I pitched it with the idea that "Well, even if people hate us and we get hate mail you'll still get attention". Which I now find repulsive. But I did that. The show has been criticized for focusing on appeals to emotion, especially on topics related to libertarianism. For example, in an episode about the Endangered Species Act, the show uses a highly disabled woman in a wheelchair who cannot build her dream house on a specific lot because it is also a habitat for an endangered bird as an argument against the Act (they also misidentify the as the more common /). One person losing her dream home is not too bad compared to a struggling species that are constantly losing their homes. Whatever valid criticisms they may have of a subject are sometimes obscured by over-reliance on shock and emotion instead of logic and facts.

The show is also well-known for ad hominem attacks against people who support the position being questioned by the show. The format of Bullshit! is such that individuals on both sides of an issue are interviewed by themselves, not in a debate format, allowing Penn to take potshots at them through post-production narration. Penn has explained this is a comedy tactic and that he does not really support insulting a person if you debate them, and it also forms part of their apparent defense against libel, as it's fine to insult people quite dramatically, but you can't call them charlatans, as explained on the show.

Some episodes of the show feature individuals from the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank opposed to nearly every form of regulation of business, to argue Penn and Teller's position. The two are both fellows at the Institute but the potential conflict of interest is never mentioned; in one episode, Penn even describes the Cato Institute as "some wonky think tank in Washington".

However, Penn and Teller at least have the decency to openly admit both their usage of emotional appeals and their bias, and regularly point out the unscientific and simplified format of their show. They also planned to make a "Bullshit of Bullshit!" finale, but the show ended too abruptly for this to be realized. In November 2015 Penn said "we may still do "Bullshit of Bullshit".

Episode guide
This is a list of all Penn & Teller: Bullshit! episodes, alongside a brief synopsis and our own rating of the quality of the episode. Since the name of the show is Bullshit!, the basic presupposition of the programme is that the topic covered in each episode of the show is indeed to be considered bullshit, which Penn & Teller spend the episode trying to argue that it is.

Thus, a positive rating from us for an episode will read Bullshit! (meaning that the topic of that episode was indeed bullshit), while Not Bullshit! means that Penn & Teller were mistaken in calling bullshit on that particular topic. Episodes rated with Partial Bullshit! denote, as the name suggests, instances where the jury is still out on Penn & Teller's decision to call bullshit on the topic in question, or where the episode consists of a mixed bag of fact and error.

A few first-season episodes treat 2 subjects; those are listed separately with an a or b suffix.