Ray Alan 1930 - 2010

No, not the basketball player - that's Ray Allen. Ray Alan is a British game show host who just died at age 79.

I don't know enough about the man to write an obituary, which is just as well as I'm leaving for a few days out of town and don't have time to write a full post. Still, I thought I should at least mention it.

I'll be back next week.

Aaron

Covering All The Bases

You know, maybe I'm not really telling the truth when I keep saying that there's no news. The fact is that there are actually several new shows coming that I just haven't gotten around to yet. In this week's post, I'll make an attempt to cover five upcoming shows, two of which we actually have firm premiere dates for. The three that don't have firm premiere dates, of course, could end up not happening, but still, let's take a look.

• Downfall (premieres June 22) - A contestant is standing on top of a skyscraper. If this contestant wins the game, he\she is awarded $1,000,000 in cash. If this contestant loses the game, all that cash is dropped off the top of the building. That's...all we know at the moment. Who's the host? Beats me. What's the game? I have no idea. I sincerely hope that the producers actually came up with a really interesting game to back this gimmick up. If they did, we have the next Russian Roulette (which actually came up with a really good game to back up its heavily promoted gimmick of losing contestants falling off the stage); if they didn't, well, you get it. I also sincerely hope that they don't actually drop $1,000,000 in cash off a skyscraper in Los Angeles or anywhere else.


• Late Night Liars (premieres June 10) and Trust Me I'm A Game Show Host - I put these two together because they sound to me like more or less the same show. In Late Night Liars, host Larry Miller watches a group of "puppet celebrities" (with names like Shelly Oceans and William A. Mummy) tell conflicting stories; the contestants have to figure out which one is true. In Trust Me I'm A Game Show Host, hosts Bill Engvall and Mo Rocca tell conflicting stories; the contestants have to figure out which one is true. Really, they both sound to me like they're just the Bluff The Listener game from Wait Wait Don't Tell Me blown up to a whole show, and neither sounds like it's going to work because...well, look at it this way. If Late Night Liars were Kermit The Frog versus Miss Piggy, it would have a chance...but the producers reportedly couldn't afford to license the classic Muppet characters. If Trust Me I'm A Game Show Host were Bob Barker versus Monty Hall, it would have a chance...but Bill Engvall and Mo Rocca are not exactly people you think of as game show hosts. I suppose we'll have to wait and see which of these shows ends up winning (if one of them does).


• Family Game Night - I've talked a few times on here about The Hub, the kids channel that Hasbro is going to launch on October 10. Have you been wondering which of Hasbro's board games would be adapted into game shows for the channel? Turns out the answer is...all of them! Hasbro has announced that The Hub's first game show will be Family Game Night, in which families compete in mini-games based on various Hasbro games. That's all we know at the moment, and no, it does not sound promising to me.
• Six Minds - Now this has the potential to be amazing, and to genuinely change American game shows. It's an adaptation of the long-running Russian game show What? Where? When?, a show that - in Russia - has no prizes and contestants who take it so seriously that they form the equivalent of chess clubs to play it...much like, dare I say it, Countdown in Britain. Of course, the American producers are promoting huge prizes, as well as Vernon Kay (a man best known for hosting British talent shows) as the host. Still, if this works, it could lead to some genuinely intelligent and tough American game shows; if it doesn't, at least we can't say the Americans didn't take a risk.

That's pretty much it at the moment. We'll see how all these shows turn out. If you're wondering about the really big questions, no, we still don't know what (if anything) is replacing As The World Turns, nor when the Australian version of Countdown is premiering.

Aaron

So Wrong It's Right...Not Quite

Surprise! There's a new game show on BBC Radio 4!

All right, maybe that's not really that big a surprise. While it's certainly true that many of the game shows on that station have been around for decades, they don't shy away from new ones. To give you an idea of the range, the oldest game show currently in the station's rotation, Round Britain Quiz, had it's earliest version in 1941 and is possibly the longest running game show in the world; in contrast, the newest, The Museum Of Curiosity, premiered in 2008. Indeed, what's probably most surprising about May 11's premiere of So Wrong It's Right is that this show was announced as being developed years ago with no sign of premiering. I thought it was never going to happen. I was wrong.

The premise of So Wrong It's Right...I actually think it's genius. Host Charlie Brooker asks three panelists to come up with the worst things that could possibly fit in whatever category. Whoever comes up with most horrific thing gets a point, and whoever has the most points at the end of the show wins. Genius!

Unfortunately, the show wasn't. The first problem was, in a half hour show, they only got through four rounds - there was that much banter. I know it sounds weird to say that a comedy panel game show has too much banter, but this one does. When we finally get to the categories, they're not all that funny or original. "Worst Vacation You've Ever Had" was one; while "Worst Possible Reality Show" might sound funny on paper, the panelists were speaking the truth when they repeatedly complained that they can't come up with anything funnier than the real thing. I also have to note that during a supposed quickfire round, the panelists had to keep shouting "I've got one!" I know it's silly to complain about the budget of a radio show, but would it really haved killed them to install buzzers?

The panelists on the first episode were David Mitchell, Rufus Hound and Victoria Coren. Those are all good talents, but they didn't come across as very funny here, certainly when they kept saying to each other "That idea wasn't that bad!" Charlie actually was a lot funnier then they were, with the biggest laugh of the premiere being when he described his worst ever vacation - being stuck on a car ferry to Spain that was repeatedly showing the movie Mortal Kombat. That was funny - and the rest weren't.

In short, this may have been a great idea for a comedy panel game show, but the show wasn't funny. I somehow get the feeling that if Charlie asked the panelists to come up with the worst possible comedy panel game show ideas, So Wrong It's Right would get the point.

Aaron

What Hath Millionaire Wrought?

I'm going to talk more now about something I mentioned briefly on April 15 - the concept of the Million Dollar Revival.

"Million Dollar Revival" is a term I made up, but when I describe it you'll get the idea - it's when an already successful show is forced to introduce a $1,000,000 jackpot to be "relevant" in the post - Who Wants To Be A Millionaire? era. That this has happened is no surprise; what is a surprise is that, while virtually every new show introduced after Millionaire has a $1,000,000 jackpot, there have only been five million dollar revivals. I'm going to take a look at each of them now, in chronological order:

• Twenty-One - "Never heard of it" you say. You aren't alone. The original version of Twenty-One (which ran from 1956 - 1958) actually had an excellent game and game show veteran Jack Barry as host, but is remembered now mostly for being rigged (when it's remembered now at all!) Why NBC thought it was a good idea to bring this show back I don't know, but in 2000 they did it as one of the earliest responses to Millionaire, with host Maury Povich (well, if Regis Philbin worked...). I was eleven years old, and while I recognized even then that Maury was not the greatest host, I also frequently picked Twenty-One over Millionaire. Admittedly, that may have simply been because Twenty-One offered more money, but I still think this show had a good game, if not an astonishing one - the Second Chance element didn't work, and the bonus round really, really broke up the flow. The 1950s version didn't have either of those, and actually was an amazing format...but it was rigged. Perhaps there is someone out there who can do Twenty-One right, but that person hasn't been found yet.
• Jeopardy - It was probably inevitable that "AMERICA'S FAVORITE QUIZ SHOW!" would eventually go down the big-money route, and in 2002 they did in the form of the Million Dollar Masters Tournament. Why Jeopardy had a whole two-week tournament when most other million dollar game shows enable contestants to win $1,000,000 in one game we'll never know. As for Ken Jennings...can't we just dismiss that as something the producers weren't anticipating?
• The Price Is Right - Again, probably inevitable. A primetime version of The Price Is Right became very successful in 2002, so in 2003 we got the first Million Dollar Spectacular. The Bob Barker - hosted version simply increased the bonus for spinning $1 twice on the Big Wheel from $10,000 to $1,000,000, making the Showcase flat out redundant (and making this even worse, the bonus for spinning $1 once was still $1,000). Drew Carey actually probably did this better - you got $1,000,000 for coming within $1,000 of the price of your showcase or for meeting a certain criteria in the night's designated Million Dollar Game. However, as this resulted in three $1,000,000 wins in the first four episodes, it's unlikely we'll see it again. I did, admittedly, think the contestant who won Clock Game in under ten seconds deserved a lot more than the $1,000 she would have got under normal circumstances.
• Password - This one was not inevitable, and indeed if any one show exemplifies how Millionaire changed things, that show would be Million Dollar Password. The show that once had a grand prize of $250 now had a generic post-Millionaire set and theme, a money ladder, and Regis Philbin himself as host. The show was far from terrible, but it didn't feel like Password and didn't last long either way.
• Wheel Of Fortune - Inevitable? Maybe, but it is surprising that the show began in 2008 to offer a $1,000,000 jackpot five days a week.

Why am I going through all this? This week marks the final episodes of Jeopardy's third Million Dollar Tournment - the Million Dollar Celebrity Invitational. Yes, you read that right...celebrity. They're playing for charity, and the whole thing has been broadcast starting in September at the rate of one episode a month. Seriously.

In all honestly, there's not much more to say at the moment. Let's just hope there's some news next week, or failing that, that I can think of something to write about.

Aaron

Whose Interpretation Of A Japanese Show Reigns Supreme?

This is probably hard to believe, but there was once a time when Iron Chef was a novel idea. While the franchise does continue in the form of Iron Chef America (which is pretty much the same format as the original Japanese show, but somehow doesn't work as well), the fact is that such shows as Top Chef and Hell's Kitchen have taken over the cook-off role, while shows such as MXC and Ninja Warrior have lead to Japanese game shows being associated with messy obstacle courses, not cooking. The fact that Food Network was eventually forced to introduce a reality-competition show - The Next Iron Chef - that is essentially Top Chef with the Iron Chef name on it says a lot in my book.

The show is not a household name in Britain however, although Channel 4, which premiered Iron Chef UK on Monday, is no doubt hoping it will become one. The basic setup of Iron Chef, for the few of you who don't know it: in each episode a chef from somewhere in the world enters Kitchen Stadium to take on one the show's invincible regular Iron Chefs. A flamboyant chairman reveals a theme ingredient that must be included in every dish cooked, then gives the Iron Chef and challenger one hour to cook four or five dishes while commentators cover the preparation like a sports broadcast. When time runs out, it falls to a panel of three or four celebrity judges to decide "whose cuisine reigns supreme."

Well, that's the bare-bones description...there's obviously a lot more to it than that. Certainly in the British version there is, as it is a five-day-a-week daytime show and works on a week-long tournament format that no version of this show has ever had before. There are four challengers who stay on for a whole week, going up against one of the four Iron Chefs each day. Yes, that's four against one - in each episode, each challenger cooks only one dish, while the Iron Chef must cook four in the same amount of time. Two of the dishes are designated starters and are judged at the halfway point of the show (breaking up the flow tremendously), while the other two are main courses and are judged at the end. At the end of the show, we not only find out if the challengers outdid the Iron Chef, but equally importantly, we find out which challenger the judges decided did the best, and that challenger gets a star. After four days, the challenger with the most stars gets to compete against an Iron Chef one-on-one on Friday for a cash prize of 1,000 pounds.

Seriously. That's the format, and somehow, it doesn't feel right. The whole point of this show was that a challenger would come in and face one of the invincible Iron Chefs on a level playing field...this is about as lopsided as you can get. Making matters worse, the budget...I'm not saying Iron Chef is supposed to have a huge prize (most versions have no prizes), but Iron Chef is supposed to have huge production values. This is, after all, the show that became famous for putting the Iron Chefs in elaborate color-coded costumes and having them dramatically rise up from under the floor when introduced, while as many as five commentators looked on. The British commentators (Olly Smith and Nick Nairn) do a perfectly acceptable job, but when Olly has to keep running out from the commentator's booth to interview the chefs (other versions have a separate floor commentator), you know something's wrong. There are also only two judges who stay on for the entire week like the challengers. I'm guessing the show tapes a week's worth of episodes in one day (which is true of most five-day-a-week game shows, but that's a lot of cooking!)

Honestly, I think the real problem here is that Iron Chef is one of the few game shows that I think should never be broadcast five days a week. It's just too much. This is supposed to be a big primetime event. Perhaps if Channel 4 had stuck with the straightforward once-a-week Iron Chef format, they would have been able to concentrate their budget better...but they didn't. I suppose if you had never heard of Iron Chef this would be entertaining, but as I said at the beginning, in the age of Top Chef and Hell's Kitchen, this isn't going to work.

Aaron

Hopes For The Hub

I talked on April 1 about The Hub, a new kids channel that Hasbro is going to launch on October 10, taking over the channel space filled by Discovery Kids. I said then that I sincerely hoped that Hasbro would shy away from adapting their board games for television - that just doesn't seem like something that would work to me. Well, it still doesn't - but we all know it's going to happen, so I'm going to take two famous Hasbro games and let you know of a foreign game show that epitomizes each of those games. I should stress that this is merely my opinion and that these are two very unlikely things to actually happen, but the way I see it, if Hasbro wanted to make a game show out of these two games, it's already been done in everything but name.

The first of these is one I'm sure everyone who read my April 8 post will have guessed - Scrabble. Now, I can hear you saying "There already was a game show called Scrabble!" This is true, and it was a great game show...but it had virtually nothing to do with Scrabble, and frankly, there's another show I like even better. That's right - I'm talking about Countdown. The fact is that, while I flat out adore Countdown, it would never work on American TV - heck, it would never even get on American TV - without a name Americans know...like Scrabble. I fully realize this is something that will probably never happen because...well, if you were the owner of the format rights to Countdown, which has already been a huge success in many countries, would you want it tied in with a separate property that already has a game show named after it? I would, but I'm not the owner of the format rights to Countdown.

The second game I'm going to suggest here is one that will probably surprise you...Dungeons And Dragons. I can hear you saying "OK, I give up. I can see Scrabble working, but how on earth do you make a game show out of Dungeons And Dragons?" I can answer that question in one word: Knightmare.

A truly unique and ahead of its time television show, Knightmare is a British format that ran in its native country from 1987 to 1994. It had a format very much unlike any other, yet when described, it sounds like a horrific variation on The Money Maze. A team of four kids would enter a medieval antechamber, whereupon the designated dungeoneer would put on a blindfold helmet and enter the show's computer-generated fantasy dungeon. The dungeoneer can't see anything, and even if they could, it would just be a blue-screen room. Fortunately, the three other team members are seated at a screen in the antechamber on which they are shown the completed dungeon image. It is their job to guide the dungeoneer through an endless series of puzzles, characters, traps, and whatever else towards their ultimate goal of walking out of the dungeon alive.

If that description doesn't make sense...well, there's probably no way I could describe this show that makes sense. This team wasn't competing against another for the fastest time out of the dungeon or something...they were just against the dungeon, and this dungeon was big enough that the show had rollover, meaning that games could be carried over from one episode to the next...and some teams lasted three half-hour episodes or more. It was a slow-paced show that managed to build up the kind of suspense that Who Wants To Be A Millionaire? had in its heyday. It also had such a complex medieval atmosphere that there were no prizes and even the gaps between episodes were explained as "temporal disruption." In short, this was certainly a game show, but it had a genuine fantasy feel to it. As it involved a large cast to portray the denizens of the dungeon and must have had an incredibly complex production process, it's probably too much for a new, unknown cable channel replacing Discovery Kids - but if they do decide to give this a try, I'm guessing it would be a lot more like Dungeons And Dragons than the cartoon called that.

There you go. As I've said, this is simply my opinion, and neither of these things is probably ever going to happen. All I'll say now is this - Hasbro, if you do try to develop Scrabble or Dungeons And Dragons for television, do it right. These are games that have very devoted followings of people who hold tournaments and take the game very seriously...talk to them! Get the show approved by the tournament governing bodies (the National Scrabble Association, the Role Playing Gamers Association, etc.) Wishful thinking? Yes...but there's no news this week.

Aaron

Musings On Millionaire

I've been watching Who Wants To Be A Millionaire? this week, for a specific reason. Meredith Vieira is taking a week off (something that's close to unheard of nowadays, but this isn't the first time she's done it) and the guest host is Steve Harvey. As Steve will be taking over Family Feud in the fall, I wanted to see if he's any good. Well, he isn't. He's trying way too hard to be funny...but that's not what I'm here to talk about. I want to talk about the show itself.

Today, of course, Millionaire has become the standard, to the point where I frequently describe new shows by saying things like "stereotypical post-Millionaire set" and "generic post-Millionaire music." Four of the most famous game shows of all time - Wheel Of Fortune, Jeopardy, The Price Is Right, and Password - were forced to introduce $1,000,000 jackpots simply to stay relevant. Indeed, it seemed that the only thing Millionaire couldn't change was itself - after the primetime version burned itself out, the show went to daytime, with a new host but everything else was pretty much the same way it had always been. That is, until it started changing.

I don't actually need to explain the rules of Millionaire, do I? You must remember. All together now: "You're just fifteen questions away from winning $1,000,000. You have three lifelines: 50\50, Phone A Friend, and Ask The Audience. Once you reach the $1,000 or $32,000 level, you are guaranteed to leave with no less than that. Are you ready? Audience, are you ready? Let's play!"

Well...that's how it used to be, anyway. Let's try again with today's rules: "You're just fifteen questions away from winning $1,000,000. The category for each question is now being displayed. You have fifteen seconds to answer each of the first five questions, thirty seconds for each of the next five, forty-five seconds for each of the next four, and on the $1,000,000 question, you have forty-five seconds plus any time left over. You have three lifelines: Double Dip, Ask The Expert, and Ask The Audience. Once you reach the $5,000 or $25,000 level, you are guaranteed to leave with no less than that. Are you ready? Audience, are you ready? Let's play!"

Let's be honest, it's not the same, is it? For starters, the lifelines, which were lopsided enough to begin with (did 50\50 ever work out?) are now... well, Double Dip might be useful if you had more time to think. Ask The Expert is usually an idiot has-been actor accessed via a video link sponsored by Skype. Ask The Audience, now more than ever, is the only useful lifeline. If the show would just give up on the other two and let you Ask The Audience three times, contestants might have a chance at reaching a six-digit number - but of course that would mean upping the show's budget, which I'm guessing is the real reason for all this.

Then there's the clock, which has to one of the worst ideas anyone has ever had. It starts before the choices are read, meaning that takes about ten seconds...then the contestant takes five more joking with the host before actually starting to consider the question. Like I said, it was probably all about the budget. Once upon a time, there was a genuine feeling that anyone who walked on that stage had a chance at winning $1,000,000. Now, if anyone does reach a six-digit number, it's promoted heavily and leaked to game show news sites weeks in advance.

So there you have it. People are amazed when I tell them this show is still on, and I'm guessing that if they actually watched, they'd be mortified...but the fact is, eleven years, huge changes, and countless ripoffs later, I still hold my breath when those lights circle around the contestant. Millionaire has gone from a great show to a good one, but we'll take good shows where we can get them.

Aaron