Saturday, 6:15pm,
BBC1
Mmm.
OK, we have some history with Reflex, we saw an episode being recorded last year (where it was suggested that it would lead into The Voice, which it is, but not the series anyone was expecting) and 18 months ago Martyn wrote up the pilot, it’s fair to say quite a lot had changed from that. It’s by Objective who make The Cube.
Before watching the first broadcast, here’s where we are:
- Shane Richie is very likable as host. He will apparently be providing a Twitter commentary for the first episode.
- Radio 2’s Ken Bruce will be providing commentary in some capacity, but we’re unsure as to how much it will add.
- The visual effects, which you can’t judge at the recording, are stunning. If you can’t wait to see them, sign up for a C21 Screenings account (which I believe is open to non-industry people these days although can’t promise) and have a look at the pitch tape.
- The soundtrack is a Foster/Bolam production, whom you may recognize from such shows as The Cube and The Exit List and 5 Minutes to a Fortune. In an ideal world, they’d just get to soundtrack everything.
- I still believe the games are in the main too sleight and people will tire of them quickly – most of them come down to who can do one action the fastest. It’s going to be very pretty but I don’t think it will take long for people to realise it’s a lot of filler and not enough killer, especially at 45 minutes. It is not like they mix up fast games with lengthier games of high tension like The Cube.
- They’ve already decided that the endgame, “Moneyball” is “iconic”. The next TV person to declare something new they’ve done is “iconic” will get a slap.
Putting it between Dynamo and The Voice will give it the best possible chance but my gut says after a week or two once everyone is over the effects the figures will drop quite quickly. We’ll see, though.
Friday 12th July 2012 – the date of the first pilot. Has it really been that long since I went to Manchester on an awful day and spent 5 hours watching this show?
Tell you how long ago it was – Jake was still a full year from falling into the BT Sport mincer – and the new production centre from Corrie still hadn’t been build directly across the ship canal from MediaCity.
Still, I’m looking forward to seeing Reflex with a bit of primetime spit and polish applied liberally.
In my original review, I summed up with the following words..
If it ever makes it to air, it will have ‘The BBC’s Cube’ grindstone around it’s neck.
Remember where you read it first 😉
Ummm – self correction – it was 13th July 2012 actually..
And I’ve still got the earplugs needed for the blowing things up in a shed round they gave us.
Because I’m bored, I read the source to that webpage to get a direct, no-login-needed link to the pitch film:
http://d2edczmvvhnrg0.cloudfront.net/c22a027cc88daa58eb13ba29e1a84925.mp4
Ooh, nice one!
Well, I know we were comparing this show to The Cube, but to have THE VOICE of The Cube Colin McFarlane narrating over the pitch film, you can’t think of anything BUT The Cube!
Let’s see- about 15 minutes of air time for about 15 seconds of actual game play- that’s about the rate DOND-US was going at late in their run..
The voice over’s totally ruining this. Why have such incredibly impressive visuals and (so far) decent games if you’re going to cheapen it all with poor humour taking the pee out of it all? Idiotic.
This is my biggest complaint with the show.
The pacing I felt was fine but the crass attempts to be total Wipeout redux ruined pretty much all of the games. I love listening to Ken Bruce on his radio show but by the end of game 2 I was praying for a mute button on his mic. The script he got given is terrible
The show reaks of executive meddling with one producer deciding at the last minute the show is too serious so they add a ton of bad jokes in hoping it will stick..
Started at a solid 7/10 – ended up at a 4/10 come the credits.
Competitive The Cube + commentary from Total Wipeout (my housemate who was listening actually thought I was watching Total Wipeout)
It’s watchable. I agree with the original suggestion that it feels slow above 30 mins.
The sarcastic commentary helps – in my opinion, I don’t think you would get away with playing it straight. The slow-mo and computer graphics are excellent.
Double-or-nothing at the end was not tempting at all and I was surprised they went for it: assume this was not the first episode in filming order.
I enjoyed this show and I will definitely watch again next week. Seeing things in super slow-motion is always visually impressive although I DO agree that it eats up time like a hungry time-eating thing. Out of all the slow-mos, I thought the can game’s was the most dramatic, seeing the purple team member grasp the can by the tips of his fingers only to have it slip away from him.
I enjoyed the different games, my favourite being the cascading ping-pong ball game, and I liked the team game after it as it had a very SdR feel to it with the scoring mechanism.
Moneyball was VERY impressive to watch, and I liked the mechanics of it (hit the balls in the first phase, avoid them in the second phase). Having the last gold ball to double the money will be VERY tricky, seeing as it practically means you have to jump off the platform in order to make contact with it, and the guy was brave to go for it.
Ken Bruce’s commentary was very hit and miss, though, I thought. He added unnecessary bits to get cheap laughs, like with him going on about ‘she’s going bananas, THEY’RE going bananas, she’s going even MORE bananas, HERE’S a banana…wait, that’s my lunch’ which had absolutely nothing to do with the proceedings. BUT, I DID get a laugh out of the slow-mo at the end of the first game with the purple team member’s roar slowed right down, it made it sound like the roar of some prehistoric animal! 😀
Overall – I found it entertaining even with the cheap laughs, I’ve been crying out for something entertaining on a Saturday night and this fit the bill. I WILL be watching again next week. 8/10
Went completely the wrong direction with the comedy voice over and almost parodic music choices. The games were alright, but none of them were treated nearly silly enough to warrant the editing treatment they got.
The quiz was by and far the high point for me, with the humor only coming when something humorous actually happened, along with a distinct lack of pop music.
OK, I’m going to put on my other hat, my “disability activist” one. Inevitably with shows based round speed and moving around, there aren’t going to be many opportunities for people with physical disabilities to take part. That’s just how it is. But shouldn’t designers try to make participation accessible to as many people as possible?
I’m thinking particularly of colour choices. Around 10% of men are colour blind. They would have been severely disadvantaged in that “pick the right colour balls” round. Both pairs of colours were potentially problematic.
Yes, I know this may seem like a minor point. But it niggles that something so easily fixable is never considered.
Actually having a bit of experience with this having had to come up with responses to complaints about Krypton Factor (many, complaints) – it is perfectly acceptable to create a format that is not disabled friendly, as long as you gave taken every effort to make it so.
In Krypton for instance we would have been happy to accommodate contestants with hearing disabilities, we had had discussions about sight disabilities as well. A wheelchair user however just couldn’t have competed, in that particular format, as running and climbing were central themes. The requirement isn’t to make formats that anyone could compete fairly in, but to adjust the format within reasonable bounds so that as many people as possible can compete.
That being said, Objective, having stated its format would have had to do everything possible to make their show accessible. It certainly wouldn’t be acceptable for them to turn down a contestant on the basis of colour-blindness so I imagine one of three scenarios is used.
1) There is a third set of balls that are distinct shades rather than distinct hues.
2) One or both of the sets is already as above – the pink/purple set seemed like it might be.
3) This game isn’t played with colour-blind contestants.
If they aren’t doing one of those things they would certainly be open to some kind of legal action – Objective aren’t small enough for any sort of exemption.
Also they make the Cube for which we had a very similar issue with the call and lose contests. They had to be modified to be hearing-disability friendly as for that kind of contest, adjusting for entrants with hearing loss counted as ‘reasonable adjustment’.
I used to actively fight for these kinds of adjustments to be included in our (ITVs) shows, now I just stick my oar in when I see something that’s not right.
Also, the colours of things in a TV studio are nothing like the colour you see on telly. You have to cool down reds and warm up blues because even decent TV equipment with all its racking hasn’t got the same gamut as a human eye.
Thanks Qusion. It’s good to know that these things are considered.
As expected, pretty, disappointing, pretty disappointing. And despite everything much less fun to watch on television than it was to watch live, although the drawing in of the apparatus was a neat visual effect.
I thought it opened up feeling very oddly edited, far too loud and jarring cutting and audience laughter during the contestant chat (this was good fun at the recording but feels really out of place in the production as an end result).
Someone suggested to me on Twitter that they should have run it at normal speed and replayed it with the slo-mo and I think I’m inclined to agree – as it was they were a bit dull to watch. I didn’t need the jumping through a pane of glass game to last nearly that long.
I didn’t mind Ken Bruce’s commentary, but if they were allowing silliness from him they should have kept more in from Shane. Tonally the show is all over the place.
There should have been an on screen counter during Moneyball.
The quiz remained the strongest element of the show for me, which was also the bit with the least amount of mucking about. It was fun.
I’m not quite convinced about formats based around camera trickery, to be honest.
There were some good ideas, some good design choices and one good game. Unfortunately there were several bad ideas, some awful design choices and several bad games.
Game one was fine, nothing to write home about, the glass needed to be more strongly coloured and there is no reason at all for the button to be loose, or indeed to share a button in irrelevant yellow.
Game two was flawed, if you are going to have a memory game then memorising should be fart of it. Not randomly hitting all the remaining buttons until one works. The could at least have reset the button inputs each time tey hit a wrong button. Also the plastic jelly-bean jar looked rubbish.
Game three was broken, had more unnecessary yellow and I am quite, quite sure it cannot be guaranteed that the two pyramids would collapse in the same way when hit in the same way. To use a favourite bar phrase – it is not enough to be fair, you have to be seen to be fair.
Game four had the ball containers in a stupid place, and why, pray why, did the commentator do that ‘oh look, someones won while we weren’t looking’ thing? Where is the director, why weren’t we looking? Also for someone of basically good site orange is easier to pick from green being on opposite sides of the colour wheel, than pink is from purple. If you wanted the team collecting purple balls, they should have been mixed in with yellow.
Game five was brilliant, wouldn’t change a thing.
Game six was dodgeball, I wasn’t paying much attention though as I had given up and was playing Minecraft. The golden ball didn’t appear to be going close enough to the platform to be reached mind you. I don’t think it’s a very worthwhile gamble on anything over 2 or 3 balls.
I probably wont be watching again.
My thoughts are pretty much these but to add…
Game one took AGES! The slow-mo should add to the games not detract – here the viewing public were probably sat at home shouting “get on with it!” at the TV for the duration.
As well as the problems with game four, above, I thought slowing it down actually made it harder to follow rather than easier!
I liked the quiz but why did they not use the slow-mo for some questions?! I worry that most weeks the whole show is likely to boil down to the quiz, though, and make the first 25 mins seem a bit of a waste of time. Effectively there are 5 points up for grabs in the first 4 games then suddenly as many as 14 points available for the quiz!
The idea behind the endgame was good with the green/red and hit/dodge rounds – probably my favourite bit. Maybe make it 10 of each then fire however many points you have left for the golden gamble to make the gamble a bit more enticing and make sure the red round isn’t just dead rubber beyond ball 4 or 5.
I agree the tone was everywhere, one minute the money was being built up, the next poor Ken Bruce was reading out some waffle. Worst moment was when the script decided to effectively joke about somebody losing £10,000! “I think he’s going to win… Oh no – he’s lost…”, or whatever – that’s not a jokey moment – HE’S JUST LOST TEN GRAND!
On a more positive note, I thought Shane was good and the slow-mos were pretty effective (but didn’t necessarily add as much as The Cube) and the endgame was a nice idea.
I think playing the quiz straight was one of the show’s stronger ideas myself, it’s already quite tense without adding needless slo-mo to it which would detract I think.
Yes – fair point – I think I was surprised they didn’t use it to differentiate between the close results and just play the “obvious wins” at full speed, really.
Well first and foremost – theres things I like about the show, which puts it quite a bit above 50% of the shows that came out in 2013 for instance.
The slow-mos do look fantastic, the bit where the yellow can was hovering in the air did look genuinelly stunning and breathtaking, and I believe a great gameshow makes a normal ordinary person BE extroidinary. I certainly think it achieves that. I would love to have seen the players play ten-twelve games, with less in depth re-runs, but I understand that may not be possible due to budget/set-up times etc.
Two things that did bug me were the voiceover, which the main fault would be that it was distracting from the actual gameplay, and a personal niggle was the contestants wearing polo shirts! When you have a set this expensive and slick, can’t we dress the contestants a bit better?
That said, I think with some tweaking, its a really good show. Agree the end game is wicked, but feel that red ball round needs tweaking. Personally I think falling off the podium should be punished with automatic loss.
Well, that certainly wasn’t what I was expecting. And because, way back when, I was so bloody wrong about the debut of The Cube, I’ll be a little more open-minded here. Random takeaways:
– Visually, it’s another winner from Adam Adler and Objective. I don’t know that I can call it truly “groundbreaking” as The Cube ended up being. The color choices are still vivid but a little more varied and, dare I say, happier (unlike, say, Exit List using almost the exact same green/red/blue). Same goes for the font choice … all-caps are serious, eh, so all-lowercase must be not-serious.
– Agreed that the tone really, really didn’t work. It seemed like it was produced as a “serious” game a la The Cube, but then in post the suits said, “We have to make this more entertaining and light for all the families watching early-evening BBC1 who are still upset that Don’t Scare The Hare got the axe.” But as Daniel H notes above, being flippant about losing the endgame is Just Plain Wrong.
– In the quiz round, I wasn’t expecting a round to continue after a wrong answer had been given. I suppose it’s enough that the whole first half of the show can open up as much as a 5-point margin going into the quiz (though unlikely), but it seems backwards that the most visually stunning part of the show ends up being the least important to the outcome.
– Moneyball, sorry, just isn’t all that iconic. And staking it all on one golden ball just isn’t in keeping with the mantra of games that look super-cool when super-slow. I suppose the secret is that it will always be fired in a way that the player must take the “leap of faith” to touch it, and that’s the part that would have looked slightly decent, had it been tried. It will presumably be Series 2 before the players figure this out.
– With Foster and Bolam behind the music, I was expecting far more than was delivered. They had some good bits, but it seems like their brief didn’t necessarily include composing pieces that were in sync with the airy announcing. And the “licenced” music: eeeek, the Bee Gees were certainly family-friendly in that BBC1 kind of way, but in the endgame!?
– However, for all the faults, I intently watched all the way through to the end, and I’ll admit that I sort of liked it. I just didn’t like it in the “holy crap, I just saw a quantum leap in the genre” way that I was expecting/hoping.
So, then, um … 6/10, yes, will keep going to the trouble to download and watch. Maybe this, too, will grow on me … verrrrrrry slooooooowly.
Reflex 3.4m (17%)
WDW 6.0m (25%)
Splash 3.7m (15%) including +1
The Voice 8.4 m (25%)
I’d be fascinated to see a five minute breakdown for Reflex. I think a lot of people will have switched off, but other people turn it on waiting for The Voice.
I’ve only got a 15 minute breakdown, which goes 3.3 / 3.1 / 3.8. The end is obviously inflated by The Voice. Dynamo averaged 3.8 over the whole show and 4.1 in its final 15 minutes, the first 15 minutes of The Voice averaged 6.3.
Yep, I think dropping numbers from Dynamo is rather damning. Ta.
Not really much I can add that hasn’t already been said, the tone really is pitched wrong and the voice over feels very much a last minute change.
A number of very odd editing choices I felt, in the can game we didn’t see the moment the can slipped out of the purple player’s grasp, one minute it was in his fingertips, cut away and next thing we see it’s out. Missing the winning moment in the ball avalanche was an odd decision as well, although it was very hard to see what was happening in that one in the first place.
I am always a fan of slow motion, and something that I don’t think has been mentioned yet is that the graphics package and the original music (note that I say ‘original’ rather than all the unnecessary pop/jukebox rubbish) are brilliant.
I disagree with a point made earlier that they should run the game at full speed and then replay with the slow-mo’s, once the result is apparent the replays are pretty redundant.
Like with so many things these days, there’s a great show in there somewhere but production decisions have stopped it showing through.
Honestly? I was very pleasantly surprised and would much, much rather see this in the HoF than the HoS. I don’t know whether this will reward repeat viewings, but a single episode of it was really pretty cool. It may well be more enjoyable the less critical you are about it. (“It’s the Scavengers of 2014!”)
It is brave to have a show that depends on so few seconds of action. BBC One have had quite a few misses, but they’ve often taken some pretty big swings even when they’ve been missing. I hope Objective can sell this around the world; I can’t imagine many countries not being impressed by the spectacle, even if there is very little game as such to play.
The show looks outstanding and sounds very good; the graphics are clean, best-of-breed and very thematic – futuristic, as opposed to The Cube which looks ever so retro-futuristic. The music package works really well in context, and the Gunslinger jingle is everything I had hoped it might be.
There is not much to argue with about tje comments and criticisms above; it’s merely a case of how hard the show’s pluses and minuses push your buttons. I liked the atmosphere much more than I thought I would; Shane Richie starts as a danger-sign rather than as a legend in my book, but the context was right for him to play to his strengths. Any show with gratuitous wind tunnel graphics raises a smile over here.
One quibble I haven’t seen mentioned yet: if you’re going to have the show’s title in huge letters on the set, let me introduce you to Mr. Kerning. You can tell me that you’ve measured out the distance between each letter exactly; I’ll tell you that it looks wrong, and when your camera is not head-on (for very good reasons) it looks really, really wrong.
I really need another episode to decide whether it’s a turn-on or turn-off for me.
Ok. Because I was there at the ‘birth’ – let’s see how it did on it’s first day at school…
There was a moment in the commentary soundtrack on Saturday which went “Ken, what ARE you doing?”
I still am wondering if that was part of the script or a very public cry for help from Mr Bruce in the dubbing booth.
Wow. What a roller coaster ride of over produced post production techniques this is. My fears for the show since July 2012 have (sadly) been realised.
At times it looked like a game show, others a demo tape for the company that provided to super slo-mo cameras for the show.
Another thing is that once you strip out the slo-mo’s and super slo-mo’s, the reversing, the graphics, and the multi-angles of each game, what you have is a fantastically poor set of party games played out on prime time television.
Game One – weak physical game – although to give Objective a bit of credit – since the pilot where upto 5 contestants when against each other, it’s now a head to head scrambling to a button on a mat which some unidentified liquid on it – obviously because it looked good in slo-mo
Game Two – bog standard test of memory – although it lasts longer in your memory because of the slo-mo of the items exploding, rather than the sequence in which they exploded.
On the up side, it was only 3 items in the shed in the pilot, so at least its been made more difficult for the real show.
Game Three – short physical game played with baked beans cans. Ruined by the overlong overplayed ‘game over’ sequence afterwards, which in reality was 3 seconds after the game was won – so not the extreme time you thought it was by Ken Bruce’s uncredited cliché riddled script.
Game Four – was tricky, but only when it was shown at full speed – which is not the idea of the show. Neither was it clever to keep showing bursts at full speed, and saying how silly it was to show it like that.
Game Five – standard logic puzzles, that would feel quite at home on a Children’s party Quiz DVD. But it did show as a good example of why we’ve never got slo-mos of contestants on similar quiz shows pressing the buzzer to answer…
..Because it adds f-all for the viewer watching at home.
That said, I did wonder watching at what point was a Quiz element added – as there was no quiz mentioned on the studio floor(or saw a part of the set built for a quiz round) in the pilot edition.
Final Round – was the one I was looking forward to seeing the most – and it didn’t disappoint. So the contestant podium has gained height (it was about 10-15cms off the ground at pilot stage) which does make it more tricky. However, there is a issue as we saw in the first show where the 2nd phase can be over too quickly, leading to more contrived commentary and long padding out leading to viewer attention wandering. We’ve also lost £30,000 from the maximum prize in the move from test out to full series.
The strange thing is so much attention and thought has been given over to the visuals, the sound on the show was terrible. Shane’s audio (who – as an aside comment – was a better host than I thought was going to be) was at the right level, but you could hear the applause/audience laughing dubs hiding brutal edits and pick-ups. And compared to the rest of the audio mix, Ken’s contributions appear to have been recorded in a cupboard under the stairs with the door slightly open, with the microphone propped up on the sofa next to it.
And do we really need to be told that we are watching the games in slow motion so frequently?
Maybe if this gets a 2nd series, show the physical games at full speed in full first, rewind, and then pick things out in full multi-angle, slo-mo replay, HD glory, rather than the ‘see that, look at this, see this again from front on, look again in half speed’, style of presentation.
So in summary. Visually, great. Game ideas, rather lacking. Audio, terrible.
I doubt at the next meeting of Channel 4 executives, there will be a which-hunt launched to find out exactly why or who passed over picking this up for a full series.
I stand on my podium and swot 7 red balls away out of 10
(or more accurately 7.704 as we are dealing in thousandths all the way throughout the show)
Ken Bruce used the line ‘amazeballs’.
NOPE.
As soon as we were informed about the previously-undisclosed-to-viewers rule against falling off the podium during The Iconic Moneyball, I turned to my friend and said, “Friend, he’s gonna fall off the podium.”
After tonight’s episode, I went back and watched the pitch film again. It’s like it’s for a completely different (and far superior) show. Perhaps when it gets exported to the international market, it won’t have such amazeballsy commentary.
3.1m last night.
Three episodes, still not feeling it. The action games are still visually interesting, but the toss-up round is becoming tedious and drawn-out. The announcing throughout has become downright bothersome.
I’m starting to think that if you put a $100,000 prize at the end and showed more of a giant arena-style screaming audience, this would be right at home at prime time on a U.S. network. With Guy Fieri as host. Heaven help us all.
The real problem for me is that they really overplay the slo-mo, to the point where there are large stretches of time where it looks like nothing is actually happening. And that’s *really* boring.
See, I’ve no problem with the excessive slow-motion: it’s become the show’s style. Kniwt’s points about the second half of the show are accurate, I can envision turning over when the quiz begins. Something to do with the announcing is bothersome, though I’m not sure if it’s script or voice or what.
The host has completely flown under the radar. In the Week, I looked at the games, the style, the announcer. Shane Richie was mentioned in passing. Does this mean he’s irrelevant to the show’s success, and could be replaced by Kate Thornton? Perhaps not, but he doesn’t put a stamp over the show in the way he did on “Run the Risk” (see: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XAkx1HZUoyE ).
I do find it quite weird that they’ve let Ken Bruce run riot yet kept Richie, who was very entertaining on set, in the background as much as possible.
Good call, and I’m going to argue that a US version could potentially be a very good show. Here’s my case.
The problems with BBC Reflex are (a) the tone of the show, which between look and sound (through host and commentator) is neither fish nor fowl and (b) the fact that there is just a bit too long a slot and a bit too little content, leading to some of the replays being replayed a bit too often for comfort. Both of these would be relatively easy for a US show to crack, especially if they were able to throw slightly more resources at it and get one more game into the US TV hour slot, showing each game in its best light and yet letting it go before it outstays its welcome.
A prime-time U.S. hour is hovering right around 42 minutes these days, so they wouldn’t even need to add anything. And by the time you add in four sets of hypetastic ad-break intros and outros (“The orange balloon is about to burst, and You Won’t Believe What Happens Next!”), there’s another two minutes gone.
Oh, and allow another minute just for all the times Guy will say “One, Hundred, Thousand, Dollars!!” (The crowd roars.)
And after three disappointing episodes, it’s gone from the schedule for at least the next two weeks (that’s as far as the schedule goes for now) to make way for Six Nations Rugby. At least I’ll stop searching for new episod– wait, no, stop flying to the UK every Saturday night, yeah, that’s it.
Yeah, at the end of the third episode, the continuity announcer said it would be taking a 3-week break because of the Six Nations, so it should be back on the 22nd
Interesting to note that there’s a Reflex-sized hole on the 15th, into which BBC1 has decided to put a repeat episode of Pointless Celebrities. But over on ITV, there’s some men’s football between Manchester City and Chelsea.
Make of that what you will.
So Reflex came back last night (a week earlier than expected, and at 5:15pm this time!?), and something happened that I did not think possible: The commentary became even more banal and inane.
Don’t Scare the Hare, Puppets, now Reflex … when will BBC1 figure out that their strategy might not quite be hitting the mark?
1.1m for this on Saturday apparently. Incredible.
This on at 5:10 tonight, Reflex fans. Fan.
OMG, there’s an official app on iOS and Android.
Oh look, there was finally a £20,000 winner on Saturday. (This just in: Reflex aired again this past weekend. Who knew.) Of course, it took: (1) a “very special” celebrity edition for charity, and (2) a change to the rules “this time only” that didn’t put the £10k win at risk.
Commentary still as annoying as ever.