Contestants were then escorted to Raleigh Studios, in Los Angeles, California, where the actual gameplay would commence; with the intent of the contestants staying awake, and "cramming" various material such as trivia questions and jokes, which they would then answer on the show while attempting physical stunts in an attempt to stay awake.
[3][4] Graham Elwood was the show's host, with assistance from Berglind Icey, Arturo Gil, and Andrea Hutchman.
Each team was required to talk about one of three articles, (two in the second season) they had been assigned to read, while exercising inside a giant hamster wheel.
If a team said one of the eight hidden key words or phrases related to the article, ten points were added to their score.
Which also in turn, penalties were strictly immediately enforced, complimented, and followed by a loud buzzer, intending to further disrupt a player from ranting.
In season two, stunts are shown upfront, and contestants chose the task strictly, loosely related on a book or magazine they were told to study.
Stunts took various forms, such as demonstrating yoga positions, matching cuts of meat to a picture of a cow, or even firing hard candies at small chocolate bunnies using a slingshot.
The question answering partner, had 40 seconds (45 seconds in the first season) to answer inane trivia questions, which the players were told to study prior, (varying from riddles, puns, jokes, compound words, or alternative media franchise titles) posed by Elwood, each worth 30 points.
In some episodes, if an activity partner was doing an endurance task, operating a mechanism, a projection screen was displayed behind the players, which featured a front POV video recording, of a person driving a Saturn Ion, throughout the streets of Los Angeles.
If the round involved a table of lemon juice shots that the activity partner had to drink, an evil dwarf named "Dr. Damnearkilter" (Arturo Gil) appeared to constantly heckle the activity partner by whipping the table and shouting stuff like "DRINK IT!
"Miss Pickwick," the "resident sleep therapist" (Andrea Hutchman),[5] would read the team a series of bizarre facts, historical events, and other strange pieces of trivia.
In addition to the facts, contestants were also read various suggestions such as "You're getting so sleepy" to make staying awake even more difficult.
A 60-second countdown immediately started, and the team had to get out of bed and run across the stage to Elwood, standing on an uncomfortable object, following the promised format.
However, before the team could answer a question, they had to get all four feet off the ground and onto the object, (which varied greatly, and no rhyme or reason for the object being selected was given; from a small flat raised circle stump on the ground, a balance beam, a rolling log, a high wire, two surfboards or two raised balance levers) that was located in the center of the stage.
Every time a part of anyone's body touched the ground, a buzzer sounded and Elwood would stop reading and restart the question when the players recovered.
(Players could respond and answer immediately, at any time their feet were off the ground, without waiting for him to finish the question.)
GSN would air Cram in first run on Sunday nights, with reruns being shown sporadically through the network’s time slot.