THUMP THUMP THUMP
Just watched last night’s premiere of The Great Escape (from the US TNT network), it’s almost very good but there are a number of things that count against it.
First of all: how it works (I’ll hide specifics and criticism under a spoiler at the end):
- Three teams of two go to a place and are locked up. The first team to escape by finding four bits of the Great Escape Key win $100,000. For the first episode they’re escaping Alcatraz.
- The teams begin in “the detainment zone” where they are locked into cells. They need to find the Great Escape Map which will show them the escape route and they need to find a key to escape the cell. They can move on to the first stage.
- There are four stages located at various points around the location. For each stage there is a task. Completion of the task earns a quarter of the circular Great Escape Key (to unlock the treasure) and an object to help them escape.
- Between locations guards are patrolling. If a guard spots them, they must drop all clues and go back to the Detainment Zone where another key has been hidden. STEALTH ACTION!
- All four bits of key found, when put together it spells out the location of host Rich Eiser and the treasure chest. They must race to the Transportation Zone to meet up with ‘an accomplice’ and pick up transport and get there. The first team to arrive wins the money.
- Whilst this is all going on, team progress is relayed to the other teams via a cold woman’s voice on a tannoy.
Spoilers under the cut.
First of all, Alcatraz is obviously a brilliant location for this sort of thing and I very much look forward to seeing what other locations they use. When you think of Alcatraz you’re probably thinking tense and claustrophobic and dark and moody.
However you wouldn’t know that from the music and editing. In fact you can tell the people behind The Amazing Race are behind it, it’s all hurried and exciting and thumping and it doesn’t work here AT ALL. This is fine where the action is more manic and the setting more open but here I found it really really detracts from the action and the setting.
The tasks, whilst showing initial promise, are not that interesting either. In this week’s episode:
- Find a locked box in one of the 300 plus cells, then use some tools to open it. Inside, you get a torch and a multiplication problem in the form of a riddle. Use the answer to unlock the padlock on a gate.
- Use a magnet on a string to pull a bag towards you. Inside the bag is a navigational map and compass.
- Shift ammo boxes and sandbags until you find a boat key.
- Search the area for a jerry can.
Initially this shows a bit of promise but the fact remains these are pretty light ideas for challenges. They’re not Now Get Out of That. They’re not even Jailbreak. They feel like Amazing Race roadblock cast-offs when they should be Mole-esque or Crystal Maze style tests of ingenuity or Boyard-esque fun.
Please note that if you get into prison for real it is unlikely someone will have left a map for you and challenges along the way.
The objects that get picked up should feed into later challenges ideally instead they’re just carried along for narrative really, so they can use the boat. But we don’t really need that narrative because the GE Key performs the exactly the same function, telling the boatman where to go and drop them off. It should be one or the other.
Host and sports journalist Rich Eiser is entirely adequate having pretty much precisely the same rhythm and intonation explaining challenges as Phil Keoghan does on The Amazing Race but with less of a New Zealand accent.
This is a show with potential and it’s much easier to get angry at a show that shows promise but doesn’t quite get there compared to a show that has nothing going for it in the first place. They need to drink less coffee before going into the edit suite. The challenges need to be a bit more ingenious. I’d even go as far as to suggest they should combine this with Bother’s Bar favourite Drop Zone and have it as a weekly elimination competition with losers “stranded” at the locations and the final teams escaping for very large cash prize.
I hope someone picks it up to make it their own.
Canale5 is axing Il Braccio E La Mente, here’s why
http://static.blogo.it/tvblog/graficopreseralicanale5.jpg
it’s going to be replaced by reruns of Enrico Papi’s Wheel Of Fortune
Brig has nailed it, again.
I’m not necessarily opposed to the concept of Jailbreak condensed into an hour; indeed, lovely OB, consumate setting. But the challenges would have been bad Scavengers games, and that’s saying something.
I don’t necessarily like the concept of “American good”; after all, this is the nation that most recently gave us Million Dollar Mind Game. However, this just lacks the cleverness and suspense of, say, the Interceptor design.
Well in fairness, Russia gave us Million Dollar Mind Game.
Edit: Actually no that’s unfair, I see what you’re getting at, But MDMG is *genuinely* good rather than “American” good. Which was a joke anyway.
Suppose there’s only one team and they’re up against a time limit; anyone who gets out in time shares the prize money. However, if anyone gets caught, they’re out of the game personally and the rest of the team continues from where they are, instead of the whole team returning to the start with a little time penalty. Does that work better? Does that incentivise the team to split up, which I imagine would be poor for TV purposes… Does that incentivise lots of “You go first, no you go first, after you” conversations – and, if so, is the presence of the time limit sufficient to get the team moving again? (Would something like an OutRun-esque topped-up-after-each-stage time limit do the trick?)
It’s a mroe interesting set-up but I’m not sure it solves the show’s underlying problems.
However, I’ve thought for a number of years someone’s going to make a bloody great format using the principles behind Outrun.
Ok, i’m enjoying the Great Escape
Even though it uses the same timing stings as the amazing race, the tension is almnost unbearable!
Loving the maps of the locations…hoping that continues
Well done, Marc Eisen – a nice twist on the reality formula!
Looking forward to next week
You’re being generous to the challenges.
1) Finders Keepers. Also used for time penalties (How many keys were in those cells, anyway? Guitar, Soap, Mattress… One key shows ingenuity on the previous prisoner’s behalf, two keys shows carelessness on the guards behalf, three keys completely breaks the drama and I can’t help but think there might have been a fourth key given that there were three places the contestants could realistically get caught.)
2) Tools to lock box to key combo. This, for me, is what worked best.
3) What felt like the uninteresting part of a Crystal Maze game. Actually – didn’t The Crystal Maze do a ‘use the apparatus provided to grab the unreachable thing’? Only, requiring the contestant to construct equipment from the apparatus rather than just providing it wholesale? As in… Wasn’t that literally half a Crystal Maze game?
4) A very bad Fort Boyard game.
5) Geocaching. Without the GPS. While I believe you could do a gameshow based on geocaching, that really isn’t the way to do it.
…The guard evasion was probably the best part of it, which… Actually felt like a challenge from The Mole. Which, again, seems to agree with Brig’s comment about the show should have been more like The Mole and less like The Amazing Race.
I’m also going to say here – Isn’t the home stretch in the first episode a bit… Daft? Surely the game’s over once one team gets on the boat with the correct destination? What’s the point in playing it out as a race, when they both have ferrymen to take them so there’s not even a navigation/skill aspect, just… Sit in a boat waiting to get to the end of the course. In other scenarios that might work – When the home straight is under the team’s control rather than… Well… Feeling like something that the US Krypton Factor assault course would have laughed off as being too pointless. I mean, yeah, cab rides in The Amazing Race could be considered to have similar issues, but how contestants deal with cabbies, pick cabs, etc, are all under the contestant’s control.
There was another problem I had with the tasks, actually – There was an awful lot of positive feedback in there, which, like a home stretch, hurts possibility of tension. Rewarding teams for doing well early on is one thing, doing so via making it harder for trailing teams to get back in the game than it would be all things being equal is something else entirely. Negative feedback – that is catch-up mechanisms and peg-the-leader style stuff, are needed in games to make the runaway leader problem less likely to crop up and help keep the players engaged throughout, and in gameshows more so as to help increase the chances of a close finish for the audience. Just… Not to the point of making everything beforehand pointless, and different people have different threshholds for that.
This show, however, had the lockboxes (Harder to find the third than the first two, but that didn’t come up), the gates (they made one of the gates much harder to get through than the other two), the magnet bags (the later a team got to them the harder a task they had to get them), the gasoline (three tanks makes it harder to catch up if you’re behind) causing an early lead to be difficult to surmount. Normally wouldn’t bring up the gasoline or the lockboxes, but with all the other positive feedback in there… (Heck – Simply not setting things up to make the trailing team’s task harder than it would have been otherwise – i.e. removing the positive feedback – would have helped not making the Blue Team look completely out of the running considerably)
(Actually, let me clarify this – I’m not saying there needs to be negative feedback thrown into the game; based on overall performance I think the correct team won the day. I’m saying that there’s so much positive feedback in here – Teams that are behind are, all things being equal, going to fall further behind due to being put into disadvantageous positions as the game continues that there needs to be a little negative feedback to compensate, or remove most of the positive feedback from the challenges where doing so wouldn’t make things even more artificial feeling [i.e. Don’t Add Extra Gasoline Cans For Teams 2 and 3] and come backs should be possible rather than… Seemingly not)
Presentation… OK, yeah, I know it’s a petty criticism for it being an artificial course based on the scenario in the right location for the scenario, but… Somehow it felt more laid on for the team than Interceptor, which while, yeah, was obvious in it laying it out was at least possible to suspend disbelief while watching.
Did the US gameshow thing of cutting away from the action to people talking about the action in retrospect, which always bugs me, but, whatever, it’s an American action/adventure game show, it was always going to do that.
Music was overly bombastic, which Brig picked up on. This was an action movie as a game show, yes, but it was an stealth based action movie, not Pirates of the Caribbean which is what it felt like it was scored for, and as such it wasn’t able to get the tension the scenario deserved.
Liked the updates on where the teams were in relation to each other with one exception – The way it was presented implied that a team in the holding cell after being caught at the start of Stage 2 was being one who was still doing Stage 1, when the penalty was essentially a justified time penalty, with varying times to get out.
Grahical presentation like the music is a little over bombastic for the game, but it isn’t as much a problem as the music for me, nor do I think it’s as overly bombastic – These are genuinely gorgeous locations, by all means show them off.
Overall, I’d give the first episode a 6/10 and hope that it gets a second season so it gets an opportunity to fix the problems on evidence – They’re all easily fixable things – which I doubt will be fixable in the edit suite at the last minute for the most part. Not that it will fix the Cutting Away From The Action To People Talking About The Action thing.
Re: 2) I was surprised when the challenge was introduced as a test of ingenuity that I thought they were going to have to work out how to create the magnet. Evidently I wasn’t really paying enough attention, because obviously we got “chuck the thing at the thing”.
Episode two of this more interesting than ep 1.
I’ll qualify that, challenges of about the same standard, but there is a quite fun transitional puzzle to open doors which hints at the sort of quality the show *could* have.
Editing felt less irritating as well, how much of that is different technique and how much of that is goodwill I couldn’t as yet tell you. I think the music’s slightly lower key this week – still boombastic but feeling less so.
Music still too explosion-actiony for the stealth-actiony feel the setting and overall task seems to want to have for me, but certainly better than last week on that.
Slightly more variety of tasks, I think – Very light code breaking and only two ‘find the thing’ tasks rather than last week’s three and the repeated escapes from the cell didn’t seem as arbitrary due to actually forcing the lock open rather than finding a key (Seriously – How many keys were in those cells in Alcatraz?).
Also they didn’t try to play ‘watching teams wait for their boat to arrive’ as a race, though they might have done that again if it was closer.
Also the too much positive reinforcement problem wasn’t there this week.
I’d give this week’s episode a 7/10 – the tasks are still far too basic and it’s hard to even get a feel for what the story was this week (Last week, sure, prison break, this week… Escape a military vessel and get picked up by the coast guard… What the heck is that meant to represent? If it were meant to be a sinking ship, why the guards and the brig? If they’re meant to be military prisoners, why the coast guard? And if they’re meant to be caught saboteurs or spies, why are they escaping after getting out of the brig rather than doing sabotage or getting intelligence after doing so? Am I over thinking this?) but definitely better. Still flawed, but now watchable in it’s own right rather than a case of watching hoping it will improve. I still hope it will improve, since it’s not as good as it should be yet, but it’s no longer sinking its own good idea, just… Not firing on all cylinders.
I would presume given the keys were found in the same order for each team the producers just replaced them after one was found.
As far as I recall they weren’t – The soap key was found earlier by one team than another, as were the keys in the beds (Which one team found first when the other two teams found the one in the guitar first)
Episode three of this in an abandoned mental institution is even better still – do wonder if Alcatraz was a pilot. Fabulous location, better puzzles (with items that feed into later tasks, good) and something that looked properly dangerous to do even though it probably wasn’t really.
It struck me that an abandoned institution would be a brilliant location for a show in the Boyard/Maze mold.
Agreed on it being better. Most of the tasks are still poor individually, but worked together here (Cutting a ropes and digging ditches worked least well)
They actually seemed to edit it to have some sort of atmosphere this week, too, rather than just bombastic. It felt nicely claustraphobic and intimidating rather than just bombastic (Which, yeah, was better last week than the first but it felt right this time)
Tasks could have been a bit more interesting still, with the exception of the code task and the transitions, but I’d actually be willing to give this one an 8/10. That might be due to the first episode, though, if this was the first one I may have been thinking 7/10 for it because it does everything it feels like it should do, with slightly poor tasks.