Buzzerblog has the skinny on this Summer’s BIG NEW WORLDWIDE QUIZ SENSATION.
We’ll go into more detail when we’ve got time, but right now it sounds eerily like Big Money Quizzlestick.
I just think it’s got Big Hyped Flop written all over it. I’m not quite sure it has mass market appeal, and I’m struggling to see how they’re going to keep a fast pace given a ten-second limit per (apparently tough) question and modern production choices. Are they aiming to fire off 500 questions over the course of the nine nights or what?
If you have to get 50 questions right to win anything is it going to feel like a lot of effort for not much reward, not only as a player but as a viewer? This can be mitigated if the game is fun but the jury’s out on that right now.
It just looks a bit too complex for the average TV watcher- one small advantage is that for the most part it’ll be up against reruns (the first episode is the last day of May Sweeps, the traditional end of the regular TV season)…I wish them well, but I’m not fancying their chances to be honest.
I’m a bit more hopeful about it than you. Admittedly I’m not sure how US scheduling works) if they could get it scheduled straight after Jeopardy! and keep the same fast pace of questioning going then that gives it a shot. J! has Daily Doubles to change the pace; this has the three special types of questions it mentions.
This format also has a lot of incidental shots of tension; the potentially-eliminating questions will be tense, and will crop up every few minutes, which will make the potentially-eliminating-but-one questions a little tense as well. Perhaps the ends of the rounds will be a little more tense as well, though it might make sense to ensure the fiftieth question of each round is some sort of boss question.
My real issue is repetitiveness; even if they play it at J! speed (and I think J! speed is top speed, not Fifteen-to-One speed, because of the category changes between questions) then (as you say) they’d be doing well to get through e.g. 120-150 questions per episode – so a contestant who managed to get onto show three and was genuinely in sight of the big prize (presumably $500,000, or 500 ounces of gold, or a 500-night holiday) would be quite a thing.
If – as I fear – they just have a total of 500 questions over nine nights at a slow rate of 50-plus questions per show, and whoever’s at bat at the end of the ninth night wins the big prize no matter whether they started at question one or question 499, then that’s rather less interesting. Not completely uninteresting, though; every show would feature the end of a round, and thus the chance to have a natural conclusion.
In the UK, I’d keep it low-key and put it on Channel 4 in the afternoon as a not-not-Fifteen-to-One show that pays out a “won one round” prize most shows and a huge prize once in a blue moon. (Even a very strong contestant who gets six of every seven questions correct might be expected to go three-and-out once every 343 questions.)
The elimination questions won’t be *that* tense, as a viewer I’m only likely to care if they get several hundred questions in.
The special questions will put paid to any chance of getting through 120+ questions an episode – you’ll have to explain the rules each time they come up and they’re going to take considerably longer to play, for the payoff of… one point.
I think they have a title, they have a basic concept, they have Mark Burnett and then they’ve thrown lots of things against a wall and this is what’s left.
I think they have a title, they have a basic concept, they have Mark Burnett and then they’ve thrown lots of things against a wall and this is what’s left.
Seems reasonable, but that’s not necessarily bad.
I’m getting more excited about this – though, to be fair, I’m the person that liked Million Second Quiz, and I’m getting more excited about the version of the show in my head than the one they’re going to produce.
If you were to apply the “ten minute time limit for a round of 50 questions” conceit (which it sounds like they’re not going to, but which they could do and I would do) then that would force the pace right there. It would also mean that contestants really would be required to think about strategically passing to save time, particularly on the longer-format questions, at the risk of meaning they raise the tension for themselves on the questions that follow afterwards.
It could also mean that you could apply what old-school gamers would refer to as the Out Run gimmick: for round two, you have the time left over from round one plus another nine minutes, for round three, you have the time left over from the first two rounds plus another eight minutes and so on. This would give you a total of 55 minutes for 500 questions, which is definitely possible, but requires a real turn of speed. (It also means that strong players might choose to take whatever money-tree end-of-round prize they have rather than gambling against a round deadline that they consider to be too short, which is also a good-feeling conclusion.)
If you were going to do that, I think you would have to have an unpassable boss question to complete each round, though. The “top ten challenge” format question would seem ideal, though it is effectively the same as the endgame of 5 Minutes To A Fortune.
Jeopardy is a non-network show so it airs all over the place depending on what local broadcaster has the rights and when they’ve decided to schedule it. It does air immediately before ABC’s prime time in some major cities (including New York and Los Angeles), but ABC seems to prefer to hold off until later in the evening for its first-run summer series on the presumption that nobody is sitting in front of the TV until after the sun goes down.
To say I despair for the state of American game shows would be an overstatement, but enough time has passed since a new studio-based game show format invented here really caught on that I’m not sure when it was–the 1980s, maybe?–and I’m pretty sure that this won’t be the next one to catch on.
Even with that, all I can think when I read the summary is that they could have gotten better formats elsewhere. If ABC wanted tough trivia, they could have just bought Mastermind. If they wanted trivia with a king of the mountain twist, they could have bought Avanti.
This seems very much like a Quiz marathon.
Since Adam Buxton has officially uploaded Quizzlestick to youtube you can watch it there:
All that said, it’s a very interesting move to make Richard Quest host. He can be quite…eccentric to say the least (and I don’t mean that in a negative way) so he may jolly things along quite nicely.
Yes indeed. Of all the elements the show has, he’s the one that’s going to be most difficult to quantify before broadcast I think. I quite like him on CNN, others find him irritating, so we’ll see.
My feeling is that the show will probably be simpler in reality than it sounds from Buzzerblog’s pieced together ruleset.
It does sound suspiciously like the Million Second Quiz, but a better-thought-out Million Second Quiz with all the problems ironed out and gimmickry removed may not necessarily be a bad thing.
I do think there’s potential for a rapid-fire quiz to be a success in the US. It’s an underserved market because it’s not the sort of show US producers like to make, despite the consistent popularity of Jeopardy. The main concern is that modern US gameshows tend to suffer from ridiculous amounts of over-production and central casting.