Mondays, 9pm,
U&Dave

The latest format from the mind of Richard Bacon sees Dermot O’ Leary challenge an audience of 75 try and win £250,000 collectively by staying silent as teams of comedy and unusual variety acts (led by Katherine Ryan, Seann Walsh and current Taskmaster contestant Fatiha El-Ghorri) encourage them to laugh or otherwise make noise. “Titter ye not,” as Frankie Howerd used to say. Noise makes the money go down, and if the comics can get it down to zero then money goes to charity.

It’s about this time of year Dave tries to find The Next Taskmaster, Battle In The Box was quite unsuccessful last year, it’s not coming back. This is rather brilliantly or unfortunately timed, either it will ride the success of Last One Laughing which was a proper terrestrial-sized hit for Amazon, or (fairly or unfairly) it will come across as a bit of a rip-off, the likely ceiling being about 10% of the Amazon show isn’t going to help it, Dave doesn’t feel like it has quite the cut through it used to have. Still, we will judge it on its own merits.

Watched it? Let us know what you think.

Wednesday and Thursdays, 9pm,
ITV1

Blimey. It was August 2013 when we started banging on about Korean show The Genius, and it’s fair to suggest that we thought that first series was a bit of a mixed bag, but the hits *really* hit, and across its four seasons it really learned what worked and what didn’t (check out our commentaries in the Specials Board), and by the end we were declaring it “probably the best show in the world being made today”. So it’s thrilling that after a bit of a Dutch misfire, we’ve got our own version that’s hopefully learned some lessons, made by people who seemingly really love the original. Let’s be clear here, it probably isn’t commissioned without the success of The Traitors. But let’s also be clear here, this pre-dates The Traitors by the best part of a decade, and actually isn’t *that* much like it.

Genius Game sees a group of people playing as individuals but invariably having to strike and break coalitions across games of strategy and intelligences both social and logical. Winning games means earning Tokens of Life (i.e. immunity) which you normally get a couple of to give to someone else except the person who finishes bottom in each game who is automatically up for elimination, and who must challenge a player of their choosing to a Death Match to survive. Doing well in games also earns Garnets – the show’s currency. These represent power and can be traded with other people for favours or traded with the house for game advantages – but at the end of the series all the Garnets in play are converted into cash, £1,000 each, that the ultimate winner will receive.

The original Korean show is, undoubtably, extremely cool. It featured an incredible soundtrack (from electronic band Idiotape) as well as found music – the strings of Extreme Ways by Moby used excellently and famously to signify a “checkmate” moment. At its best its edited like a brilliant heist movie, flashbacks and flashforwards, plans coming together, plans falling apart, “how the fuck did that just happen?” moments, moments of interpersonal comedy and drama, moments of people finding out how to hack the game that leaves everyone open-mouthed – it’s cool, sexy people playing games hard.

The question is how much of that will have translated to our version – it remains an unusual format for a channel that doesn’t usually do unusual formats so this is a big swing. On the plus side they’re really going for it, pushing it largely, giving it a 75-minute slot to allow everything to breathe, a lovely set, David Tennant to draw people in – you absolutely cannot say they haven’t put the effort in (which makes putting it up against Race Across the World and Taskmaster a bit baffling – this is going to need word of mouth quickly). But have they managed to make it cool and sexy? Have they got the reveals right? That’s a question we can’t answer for now.

If you’ve watched it let us know what you think in the comments, however for episodic discussion check out #geniuschat in our Discord.

From Wednesday 23rd April,
Netflix

The Paramount Reality Universe has long-running multi-show all-star reality challenge show The Challenge and now Netflix is getting in on the action with their NRU show Battle Camp.

Battle Camp sees eighteen of your favourite Netflix reality stars (!) from shows such as The Circle, Love is Blind and The Mole compete at a sort of Summer Camp under the watchful eye of moustachio-ed former NFL player Taylor Lewan as they compete in various games and challenges to win $250,000.

The main point of difference between this and The Challenge seems to be that to get eliminated from The Challenge you have to lose a challenge, here failing at challenges and losing popular votes means your name gets put on a wheel, and whoever the wheel lands on goes home. It will be interesting to see how much you can affect your odds, or if they might as well have saved everybody a load of time by just spinning the wheel at the start and giving that person $250,000 and we can all get on with our lives.

Watched it? Let us know what you think in the comments.