Sunday to Friday, 9 and 10pm starting 19th March
Channel 4
Greg James fronts new POWERFULLY MESSAGED returnable social reality experiment (i.e. gameshow) that happily for us basically just looks a bit like US Big Brother but without the elimination.
A group of people are split into Rulers and Grafters, the Rulers live in luxury in the penthouse, the Grafters live in penury in the basement. The Grafters will do challenges to earn money for the prize pot (which we have heard is £100,000 max), the amount of money for each one and the difficulty will be determined by the Rulers. There will be ways and means for Rulers and Grafters to swap places in some sort of power struggle and in the end there’s a winner who wins the money in three weeks. My money’s on the Grafters having a vote on their favourite Ruler. Or perhaps the Rulers will vote on their favourite Grafter. Who knows?
This might actually be quite fun, the people behind The Traitors UK are behind this and the treatment and choices they made with that compared with the original were intelligent. Is it going to be so good I’m not going to mind a three-week hour a night commitment? Don’t know. Let us know what you think in the comments.
I watched the first episode and it was a slow start so it’ll be interesting to see how it goes along, I really can’t see myself tuning in for the whole show daily at 10pm though
The contestant mix seemed a bit ‘hmm’, what on earth is Jeff from Four Rooms doing on here?! It almost seems as if they’ve had the idea sat on the shelf for a while then suddenly panicked over the success of The Traitors and knocked it up in a very short timeframe basically
Channel 4 have basically scheduled this alongside Tempting Fortune alongside Celebrity Hunted, it sort of feels they’ll all end up stealing viewers from each other!
I quite enjoyed that and thought there are quite a lot of quite interesting dynamics at play. I wasn’t expecting eliminations, I was expecting people to fall to the basement and offering a sort of entertaining ‘see how *you* like it’ scenario, but having the Rulers being eliminated brings an interesting tension – your life is rubbish at the bottom but you’re safe, there’s going to be quite an interesting timing element. Also the sets are great.
I really enjoyed this. They know what they are doing with the casting and some great choices for different dynamics. You have your outspoken types, the lazy types, the hardworking types, and the I’m only here to get my end away on TV types haha.
However I think I would prefer the voting the other way round. The workers eliminating the people at the top and the people at the top deciding who joins them.
The people at the top would have a difficult choice to make in do we take a hard worker who is earning money, which may prevent money being made. Or do we take somebody who maybe can’t work as hard to give us a better chance of making money?
I also like how the prize fund can be used to buy treats for the workers. Something tells me they will not always be £100 as that pot grows.
It’s a fantastic set, looks really good.
Greg James isn’t my cup of tea for hosting duties and I’m not sure I like the lift giving out the tasks but small things. I see this developing very much like The Circle and The Traitors as we get to know the contestants.
798k for episode one which you have to say isn’t great, especially with Celeb Bake Off as a lead-in which you have to presume did about three mill.
399k for episode two. Crikey.
424k for ep three for the show that EVERYONE is shrugging about.
I’ve quite enjoyed it on the days with proper work tasks and Ruler Voting, the off days with the Grafter Votes have been a bit meh so far (all one of them).
460k ep 4
547 for ep 5. The power of FOOTBALL.
623k episode six apparently.
The power of GOGGLEBOX.
Feel this just offers nothing original and fails in almost every area the Traitors succeeded, especially with casting a group of people clearly with no interest in playing the game in front of them.
First ep added half a mill in +7 to finish on 1.3m.
Episode 4 for me again shows up the “Odd days alright, even days a bit crap” dynamic, at no point do we feel like this is building towards something, or we’re going to get a compelling arc, refilling the Grafter spots just makes the whole thing feel like ongoing drudgery really.
It’s such a weird show, on the one hand there are some quite clever systems and dynamics which I can appreciate, on the other hand there’s a complete lack of storytelling to build compulsion. Every cycle feels like we’re roughly where we started. It’s not funny like The Traitors was, and there’s a little too much formatting going on to let the slice of life bits breathe.
It could have been such an easy show to allow for compelling narrative – wronged boss spends time plotting revenge from the basement, and they’ve completely shied away from it.
Funny how the Gogglebox clips of episode 1 was so much more entertaining and exciting than actually watching it play out live (but I guess that’s how highlights work!).
Totally agree with your comments on Twitter, they’ve completely f’ed it by not having leaders go down to the basement much earlier on. Truly what were they thinking eliminating leaders and not sending them downstairs? The most obvious, clear format point and decided not to do it for no clear reason.
I’ll just reprint what I wrote on the Discord here last night for posterity:
“The problem is doing it now lessens the appeal of doing it – the show has shifted from haves and have nots to become a game of alliances and timing, watching someone have to live with having the luxury taken away from them has far less impact now we’re aware that a) everyone’s having a great time in the basement and b) it’s the safest place to be.
The fun thing will be the realisation that only an alliance of exactly four (as it stands – this might become three if five becomes the new permanent number upstairs – enough to have someone else to vote for besides the newbie) can control the game outright, if it gets bigger than that, and it is, they’ll have to start fighting each other to stay at the top.”
Is it the safest place to be, though? 10 episodes left, 16 people, 1 elimination per 2 shows. Unless they have a sudden elimination kill ’em all in the final episodes, at some point, everyone in the basement becomes eliminated from the game, as “only the leaders can take the money”. And one would assume a fallen leader realistically isn’t getting voted to return back up there.
I’ll admit I am confused as to the end game of this thing, ever since they started bringing in new grafters to replace those promoted.
How are the ratings for this now, do we know? It feels like if The Traitors was the “show everyone is talking about” (TM) then this show might be the “show no one is talking about”.
Because we love a bit of data and Thinkbox has updated, here are the +7s in one place. Does not include devices.
Numbers are Live/VOSDAL/+7/Total/Adults 16-34, numbers in thousands.
The first ep ended up just shy of 1.3m.
Ep 2, 20/3: 299 / 56 / 537 / 892 / 156
Ep 3, 21/3: 349 / 75 / 516 / 939 / 130
Ep 4, 22/3: 395 / 81 / 412 / 888 / 145
Ep 5, 23/3: 483 / 97 / 371 / 951 / 180 (after Football)
Ep 6, 24/3: 479 / 161 / 321 / 962 / 136 (after Gogglebox)
It’s actually the Adult 16-34s that surprise me – they feel quite low, especially given that MAFS does 250-300k on E4 pretty routinely.
If you’re playing along at home, here’s week 2’s numbers:
Numbers are Live / VOSDAL / +7 / Total / Adults 16-34, numbers in thousands, doesn’t include devices.
Ep 7 27/3: 316 / 146 / 293 / 755 / ?
Ep 8 28/3: 403 / 151 / 299 / 852 / 155
Ep 9 29/3: 413 / 132 / 354 / 899 / 144
Ep 10, 30/3: 288 / 137 / 365 / 810 / 149
No 16-34 figure for Monday’s ep, I’m inclined to think cock-up rather than “under 100k” given the rest of the figures.
As we’ve come this far and it’s fascinating, Wk 3’s figs from Thinkbox (so doesn’t include devices):
Ep 11, 3/4: 307 / 190 / 379 / 876 / 142
Ep 12, 4/4: 361 / 242 / 281 / 884 / 127
Ep 13, 5/4: 387 / 189 / 276 / 854 / ???
Ep 14, 6/4: 347 / 264 / 321 / 933 / 126
Final set of Thinkbox figs:
Ep 15, 10/4: 357 / 195 / 341 / 893 / 148
Ep 16, 11/4: 317 / 206 / 344 / 867 / 122
Ep 17, 12/4: 417 / 149 / 365 / 932 / 162
Ep 18, 13/4: 484 / 240 / 329 / 1052 / 186
Make of those what you will.
My 65 year old mother who does not do reality TV outside The Apprentice loves this for some reason.
Me being a complete Reality TV junkie and only just being outside the 18-35 demographic thinks this is an absolute mess of a show.
Not watched past the first couple of episodes but seen snippets and read some articles, how on earth is the prize fund up for grabs at £85,000 of the possible £100,000?!
It’s just over £75,000 (and they lost £14,000 in one episode when the rulers couldn’t make a decision). I haven’t been keeping records but they failed some tasks completely and didn’t get the maximum in quite a few so my feeling is that the maximum price pot would have been more than £100k (but I could be wrong).
There was definitely more than £100k on offer throughout. I suspect the tasks have been arranged so the final prize is in the ballpark.
680k for the final last night, from the people who bought you The Traitors.
All sense of logic suggests it shouldn’t come back.
But. My gut is saying otherwise.
All in all I thought it was a bit of a mess.
However I do believe there is a good format in this. The work shifts were all quite entertaining and I liked the dynamic of how far is too far for the rulers.
I also liked the dynamic of rulers picking grafters to work for them. I would like to see that expanded.
I don’t think if you are in the penthouse you should be able to be voted out. They should be voted down and by the grafters vote. The grafters should be able to eliminate a player from the basement. This would rectify the issue of being no reason to want to be a ruler in the early stages as rulers could only be voted down not eliminated.
That ending absolutely needs work. Why did they just not have the grafters vote from the final 5?
I thought what was quite interesting is that all of the mucking about started to happen when in the overlap of the show going out but they were still filming and it looks like they panicked into putting twists in, that then took a fortnight to actually show up on screen so came across as increasingly ridiculous.
Was an odd scheduling decision for filming – got none of the benefits of pre-recording it and none of the benefits of it being near-live.
Oh that is interesting. I didn’t know it was still being filmed when it was going out.
I was talking with some friends on group chat while the episodes were being shown and we came to the conclusion that some of these changes were made to avoid a dominant alliance just running the show.
Some of the terminology used was a bit weird too. Sometimes they would make it clear somebody was being eliminated but sometimes it was not clear if they were being eliminated or voted down. We picked up on Ramona’s elimination they didn’t say she was eliminated they said she lost her place.
Later on in the series they used that wording again but then the contestant didn’t come back, might have been on the Jack vote.
I hold out hope, as there was issues with the structure of The Circle in series 1 and they rectified that for series 2.
Also Greg James odd choice of host and it didn’t really work for me. With the lift having a voice and a bigger role I would be happy for this to have no on screen host going forward