“My wife and I struggled with student debt and could only pay it off because — true story — I booked an underpants commercial.”

That’s how Michael Torpey, best known for his portrayal of Thomas Humphrey in the Netflix NFLX, +1.07% show “Orange Is the New Black,” begins the pilot episode of his latest project: a comedy game show where the prize is paying off your student loans.

If you did a double take at that concept (and the underwear story), then Torpey has achieved his goal. “That’s the point of the show,” Torpey, 38, said, “to be so stupid that the people in power look at it and say, ‘That guy is making us look like a bunch of dum dums, we’ve got to go do something about this.’”

Torpey’s show, “Paid Off,” which premiered July 10 on TruTV, is just the latest evidence that student debt is now “part of the popular zeitgeist,” said Mark Huelsman, a senior policy analyst at Demos, a left-leaning think tank. “This is a problem that a lot of people can relate to,” he said.

“Paid Off” is likely the first pop culture phenomenon where student debt isn’t just an ancillary plot line, but at the center of the action. Its existence is evidence of how large our student loan problem has grown over the past several years, Huelsman said. Given how common student debt has become, Torpey said he’s hopeful his game show will convince more people to talk about the challenges they face dealing with it. At the beginning of each show, contestants introduce themselves by sharing their debt burden and their major, among other information.

“This game show couldn’t have happened 20 years ago, it would have made no sense for a previous generation,” Huelsman said. “It wasn’t the part of everyday life that it is now.”

And indeed with more than 40 million Americans coping with more than $1.5 trillion in student loans, it’s no wonder that authors, screenwriters, politicians and others see student debt as fodder for reaching a wide swath of the country.

The most recent novel from famed author Jonathan Franzen, “Purity,” focused on a young woman coping with her student loans. Comedy streaming network, Seeso, debuted “Shrink” last year, which follows a doctor with more than $500,000 in student debt who fails to find a residency.

And when athletes, MacArthur “geniuses”, politicians and others come into a big payday, their experience with student loans is one of the first topics broached.

How the game works

In the show, three contestants compete in three rounds of trivia: one academic, one “Family Feud”-style poll with questions about college life — “What’s the most romantic date you can have for under $10?” (Answer: picnic) — and one round where contestants can choose to answer questions related to their major or test their general knowledge.

One contestant is eliminated each round and sometimes Torpey will send them to the audience to use the show’s red “direct to Congress telephone,” which doesn’t literally connect contestants to Congress, but instead is a prop the show uses to encourage concerned viewers to get in touch with their representatives. “Hello Congress, your boy Nico here,” the first contestant eliminated in the first episode says into the phone. No contestant leaves with less than $1,000.

The last person standing goes against the clock to answer as many questions as possible with each corresponding to a larger percentage of their debt that the show will pay off. If the contestant gets enough questions right, they win enough money to wipe out their entire debt. (The winnings are similar to any cash prize on a game show, with the understanding that the borrower will put them towards their student loan. Also like in any game show, borrowers pay taxes on the winnings).

Torpey first started thinking seriously about student loans when he met his wife, who had more than $40,000 in debt. Up until then, student loans hadn’t been much of a factor for him. “My experience with student debt was very fortunate in that I didn’t have any,” he said.

Torpey’s parents took out a line of equity from their home to pay for his education at Colgate University in Hamilton, New York. So when he graduated he had the time and space to do “all the classic actor things,” like waiting tables, and make minimal money until he got a big break. “That’s how I spent my 20s,” he said. “Had I had one other thing there, I would have been soaked.”

An emotional student loan pay off for Torpey and his family

Around the same time Torpey and his wife decided to get married, he finally got that big break — a Hanes underwear commercial with Michael Jordan that premiered in 2010. They decided to use his first big payday to wipe out her student loans.

“We wrote this check, we put it in the envelope and she started crying,” Torpey said. “I felt embarrassed that I didn’t appreciate what she’d been doing, the weight that she’d been carrying, the burden of having this debt and how it affected every single choice she made every day.”

A few years later, that interest in student loans — combined with his experience of working on “Orange Is the New Black,” a show set in a women’s minimum security prison — pushed Torpey towards a student loan-focused project, he said. The surge in comics such as Jon Stewart, John Oliver and others using their platform over the past several years to comment on political issues also helped to inspire him.

In the process of preparing for the show Torpey said his understanding of the nation’s student loan problem evolved. Because much of the attention around student debt coincided with the financial crisis, he had assumed that only the banks and the loan companies were at fault. But he soon realized, “it’s too simple to just blame the industry built around student financing,” he said.

He discovered that while those companies certainly play a role, the government and colleges are also “complicit” in the crisis. Colleges have increased tuition much faster than the rate of inflation and at public schools, that’s due in part to cuts in state funding. Federal grants also haven’t kept up with the rising cost of college. Lax regulations allowed shady schools to lure students into taking on debt for questionable degrees.

Student debt is tied to other inequities

Torpey said he also realized how closely tied student debt is to other issues like the gender and racial wealth gaps. “It filters back into some of the equality issues and some of the opportunity issues that are in our country,” he said.

So who is not at fault for our nation’s student loan problems? The students and families who are struggling under their debt burdens, Torpey said. “It’s bullshit to blame an 18-year-old for taking out money to get an education,” he said. “It’s also unfair to look at a family who took out money to support their child’s education and say, ‘Look, you’re stuck now.’”

Torpey said he and his wife are hoping they can be prepared financially when their 18-month-old daughter goes to college. They’ve already started saving. Still he knows saving enough will be a challenge. By the time she gets to school, “college will cost ...I don’t want to look it up,” he said.

Torpey and his wife are also conscious of striking a balance between preparing for the future and living in the present, he said. He lacked health insurance and a steady income for much of his career, which left him with a feeling that he needed to always be tight with money to make sure he’d have enough in case of an emergency.

Now that his family’s financial situation is more stable — his wife is a practicing therapist and he’s a working actor — he’s learning to let go a bit. “My wife and I find it very important to model a life worth living for our daughter,” Torpey said.

This story originally published on July 3. On August 28, TruTV announced a casting call for 16 new episodes of “Paid Off.” Interested contestants can apply at paidoffcasting.com.

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