Alright, some final words on Weakest Link US for now. We’ve already written quite a lot about the theory.
Pros:
- Jane Lynch is good.
- The set’s quite nice.
- Paul Farrer’s updated music is grand.
- I like having the questions on the screen.
- I like that there are picture questions.
- They didn’t “do” immunity. Phew.
- I see what they did with adding the top money from the previous round to the chain for the next round.
Cons:
- The quizzing needs to be speedier. If Anne Robinson was able to get through 25-27 questions in three minutes, you should be doing more than 16 in 2:30.
- The final vote is silly silly silly. The point of having the final round worth more money is to create the incentive to keep strong players on to build the bank, now there is… no incentive. I know they did this on the George Gray one as well, but at least it had the mitigating circumstance of having to wrap up in 22 minutes.
- But this is irrelevant, because Weakest Link where the top prize of a round is $500,000 is absolutely insane. There is no possible route to a chain that doesn’t feel stupid – either your early stages are worth so much you’ll rake it in banking after each question, or worth so little compared to the top prize nobody wins anything because you need to get more right than people probably will to be worth anything. Consider the rule of four, if they did a round like that in the UK, the fourth rung on the ladder would be £100,000, from a £10,000 start. For answering a question!
I think they could absolutely afford to be a bit more generous in the early rounds if they’re going to be a bit less generous in the later rounds. The first two, maybe four rounds should absolutely be played to the Rule of Four (with the reminder that in all versions of UK Link (except the Comic Relief special), by accident or design four questions = 20% of the target), multiples of:
$500 – $1,000 – $2,500 – $5,000 – $7,500 – $12,500 – $17,500 – $25,000
If they must play stupid money than I can accept a slower chain with more interesting gambling opportunities, although I’m still not sure how much I love it:
$5,000 – $10,000 – $25,000 – $50,000 – $100,000 – $200,000 – $350,000 – $500000
We know with the Rule of Four, and on a set chain with a double or triple round at the end, and with a 3:00 starting time, players usually won between 20-30% of the top prize – whatever it might be. With this extremely top heavy game, you’ll probably end up giving away a little bit more (but unlikely to be several hundred thousand dollars more, certainly closer to $100k than $300k) and have a more satisfied, happier audience. Most of the game will still be played on the lower rungs (because as we’ve previously suggested, basic probability suggests getting a large chain is extremely unlikely), at least the decisions are more interesting there.
Yeah, agree with all of this. It’s very close to being good but the chains are silly and it does rather destroy the point of the quiz.
I’ve just been playing around with a spreadsheet (because apparently I have too much time on my hands) and I can’t find a way to come up with a set of chains which doesn’t either 1) continue not making sense, 2) look massively cheaper, or 3) give away far more money. I’m not sure to what extent giving away more money is a problem, without knowing what the budget looks like.
I think the main problem is definitely the insistence on escalating between the rounds – if you had a steady $50,000 or $100,000 top prize until the final it makes it much easier to make the economics work. But if you’re trying to both have a $500,000 final round and (I assume) keep costs down, you’re left in the impossible position of trying to show off that you have money but not give any of it away, which means ludicrous chains. No one is here for the prize money, NBC, just do what you need to do to make the game make sense.
But this does bring me on to the central issue I have, which is that it’s not a show which can really withstand primetime. It’s perfectly good for all the reasons you’ve described (Jane Lynch and the music in particular), and the format when done right is perfectly solid.
Y’know, it’s *fine*. But it doesn’t really ever promise an outcome that’s exciting enough to make people actively decide to tune in – there will be no particular surprises or drama, there will be no massive prize money, you don’t know enough about the contestants to justify caring about what happens to them (unlike, say, when someone gets voted off on Survivor) and you basically know exactly what show you’re getting when you tune in. Which may well be fine for daytime but I suspect there’s no way of turning this format into a compelling primetime proposition, even if you ironed out all the problems.
Agree the final vote just doesn’t sit right. Odd to have the host telling them to weed out the weakest player etc, when it’s not in anyone’s interests to do so by that point in the game.
Why not have a rule if the team get rid of the overall strongest link from across the whole show, in the final vote, they then lose half of the pot.
It would make the final vote less of a no-brainer, with players still having to balance potential prize money and their chances of winning that money, but without having to do an extra round.
I think the biggest issue lies with the $1,000,000 prize. Weakest Link was never meant to be a high stakes game. I would take one player out and use this chain for Round 1
$10,000
$8,000
$6,000
$4,000
$1,000
$500
$200
If they insist on having the top prize raise in each round, I would do $10k/$20k/$30k/$40k/$50k and then $100k with 2 left. Then, you can have a quarter million top prize, and with one less round, there’s more time to chat which is what people remember more than the quiz portion anyhow
I think that is so often the case with US show – a high jackpot often does more damage than good. It’s easy to be dismissive of contestants getting a few hundred or few thousand pounds when tens of thousands are at stake, but quite another being dismissive of potentially winning tens of thousands of dollars versus hundreds of thousands.
Are we totally sure they didn’t do immunity yet? It’s possible it only gets mentioned if they actually attempt to vote off the strongest link, and I think they came pretty close to always voting off the Weakest Link the whole show, so maybe it never got brought up.
I think it would be a bit weird to just introduce the rule partway through a mid-season episode (surprise!!!), but you’re right that we can’t rule it out.
The situation might be that we will never actually know if this rule is in place unless a copy of the rules are published online. Because if there IS immunity, then the players probably all have to know that it could happen — and therefore will probably never actually try to vote the strongest link off.
One of the reasons I’m thinking this way is that I kinda think strategically Jay should have voted off Alex and played against Reanna.
The original U.S. version had the annoying tendency to have a lot of gender based alliances, more often than I saw on the U.K. version. This immunity would at least mess with THAT type of strategy, and as such might have made it more reasonable to only have a 7 player game to begin with, which would have made this version of the show a lot better in my opinion.
Perhaps both the strongest link from the last round AND the strongest link from the whole game could be immune, or perhaps someone is immune only if they are the strongest link in both the last round AND the whole game. That kind of makes this way too complicated, but it would have probably been an improvement over not having a 2 player money round.
But I digress. If the purpose is entertainment, it is at least a fun show for the trivia still.
Tonight’s episode had a situation where the strongest link was voted off, so that’s that, there’s no immunity.
That would be an interesting rule – if they try to vote off the Strongest Link, they could say “No, they were strongest… so Strongest Link, who do you want to vote off”?
I’ve been musing on this, and I’m wondering if this could work:
If, at any point, the team votes off the strongest link (not sure whether that’s best assessed per-round or over the show so far for this particular tweak), they *do* leave – *but they take half the current pot with them*.
I think that works to allow for motivation to *not* vote off the strongest link, plus it’s a bit more satisfying for the situations where the strongest link *is* eliminated. It could add an interesting choice for non-strongest links – Do I play it safe and vote in a way that only puts half this pot up for grabs, or risk all-or-nothing?
You just get rid of them early as it hurts the pot less that way.
Watched the 2nd episode tonight and I basically agree. Jane Lynch is brilliant, set and music are good, I like the on-screen questions and picture questions, but the money chains are absurd and the contestants (at least on this episode) were rubbish. I suspect the contestants were picked for their ability to sass at each other during the voting phases and not for their quizzing competency.
With the first round’s money chain, there is basically no reason not to bank after every correct answer, yet players were failing to bank after multiple correct answers. Meanwhile the final round is so top-heavy that there’s no reason to bank in the first 3-4 levels, yet I recall one player deciding to bank $2,500 for a single correct answer, which was also terrible strategy. Doesn’t help that the final 2 players tonight were, in my opinion, the 2 weakest players out of the initial 8.
One more thing I noticed was that every 5th or so question was significantly harder than the rest, usually followed by 1 or 2 absurdly easy questions. I suspect they’re intentionally doing this to save money and make the $500K and $250K practically impossible to actually win, while maintaining the illusion of a chance at it.
So, overall, a show with lots of promising elements, but the train wrecks due to a couple facepalmingly bad design decisions and rubbish contestant casting. Which, once again, makes it fit right in on NBC.
I don’t even think Jane Lynch is that good as a host. I get why they picked her (as opposed to George Gray, where nearly 20 years later the logic still eludes me), but she’s too much of an “Aren’t I being NASTY?” panto villain when you want someone who’s a bit more legitimately unnerving. Anne fell into the same trap once she bought into her own initial “Queen of Mean” hype, to be honest. You need the host to be sassy and unsettling but not vindictive, and when Jane’s entire schtick is “comedy actress typecast as vindictive cow”, it doesn’t work for this show. And when you’re compounding the problem by slowing down the quiz everywhere you can (slower question-asking, slower confirmation of right and wrong answers, tricksy wording and picture questions that require an added layer of comprehension, having to push the button AND say ‘bank’ to bank), it’s just tedious.
The prize money certainly has its problems too, for all of the same reasons US Mole’s million-dollar prizes were absurd and terrible, and as much as I’m not sure what the solution to that is all you really need to do to fix the irritating “battle of the sexes” play is to go all in on someone who does the “women have to stick together!” schtick with a comment like “what, you don’t think women are capable of independent thought?”. It’ll stop it in its tracks for that episode, and once the episode airs people will be a LOT more reticent to try it in future.
Yes, three eps in I’m coming round to this – it’s not funny enough and the quizzing’s way too slow. On top of its other issues.