Convicted felon Paul Manafort sure is having a fun one on this old episode of What Would You Do?

By William Hughes | September 4, 2019 | 10:22pm

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Convicted felon Paul Manafort sure is having a fun one on this old episode of What Would You Do?

Photo: MANDEL NGAN/AFP

For reformed children of a certain age, Nickelodeon’s What Would You Do? represents a weird niche in the Nick game show ecosystem; less psychologically fraught than Legends Of The Hidden Temple, less star-studded-for-a-very-All-That-level-of-stardom than Figure It Out, more random than host Marc Summer’s other big gig, Double Dare. (We remember, for instance, there being a higher-than-average amount of Beetlejuice content.) The show was essentially Let’s Make A Deal but with a bigger emphasis on kids and the comedic value of whipped cream pies; a quick perusal of the series’ Wikipedia page notes that its on-hand contraptions for baked good conveyance included the Pie Pod, the Pie Slide, and the infamous Pie Coaster. Pointedly not listed on said Wikipedia page: That one time that convicted felon and former Donald Trump associate Paul Manafort was on it. So that’s weird.

This comes to us courtesy of Tribune Media reporter Scott Gustin on Twitter, who passed along a Reddit-discovered video of Manafort—former campaign chairman for Trump, current convictee on tax and bank fraud charges in a New York prison—smiling happily during a taping of the series. Sadly, Manafort was not subjected to the Pie Pendulum or Pie Roulette during his stint, but was instead the side subject of classic WWYD? game “Who has the heaviest purse?”—bear with us, okay?—and who ended up having Summers dig through his wallet, revealing three American Express cards, several Visas, an AT&T card, and $30,000 in untraceable Russian rubles. (Okay, okay, we made that last one up.)

Anyway, there’s no moral here or anything—beyond the fact that no amount of minor public shame and present-day incarceration can erase year after year of easy living and trips to Universal Studios Florida for you and your family as a direct result of whatever shady shit you were getting away with all those years, of course. Mostly it’s just weird; even within the mild grilling of Marc Summers’ pie-based comedy, Manafort has a slightly hunted look, the eyes of a man who knows that the long baked good of the law could come down on him at any moment—and eventually would.

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