Well it’s not looking great so far.
I’m not entirely certain what sort of number they are hoping for, for NEW QUIZ SENSATION you would probably be wanting closer to 3.0+, in actual fact this has started not far from where non-quiz sensation Million Second Quiz ended. Our hero could probably just duck under that as a one-off (I originally had the “safe” bit at 2.0, but reduced it to 1.5 so the feature can run a bit), but shows tend to open high and drift. There are two hours of it tonight.
It’s actually not that awful, if you don’t like dark sets you won’t like it (and it’s legitimately dark, rather than a black backdrop with lots of actual light). Richard Quest holds the show together quite well, but his cadence when reading questions out is all over the place which is rather irritating.
Also there’s something wrong somewhere. When they ask questions straight it doesn’t “feel” too slow in actual fact, but the special questions break the flow of the show in quite an aggravating manner (and having them walk slightly forward and back is the most awkward thing since when Weakest Link only used to have one podium for the head-to-head). And yet without them the challenger wouldn’t really be doing very much and might as well not be there, sure they pick the category after two strikes (“Wrongs” can sod off) but given the quality of the contestants selected to play knocking someone out is probably more luck than judgement. They have very little agency, compare to other shows that ask contestants to stay on for many days at a time.
Probably will watch the next episode, but as I say I think there’s going to be a real issue when the next contestant has to start from zero again. There are probably 20-30 things you could be doing and watching at that time, I fail to see what is going to make 500 Questions the most compelling of them.
Here’s what bothers me: It has good Jeopardy-level questions, arranged in Jeopardy-style categories. It has similar moments of game variety (Triple Threats, Battles, etc.) as Jeopardy (Daily Doubles). Why does it have to move at a quarter of the speed of Jeopardy? And yet threatens the possibility of being eight times as long as a game of Jeopardy (assuming 61 questions x 8)? The game is good because it’s basically solitaire Jeopardy, the show is crap because it’s molasses.
Here’s a question that’s been mulling around my mind:
This Saturday we have a Eurovision special of Who Dares Wins. It seems to be the standard setup for a game show special; celebrity contestants, prize to charity.
Is it the first celebrity special of [i]any[/i] National Lottery show? I’m struggling to think of any others.
I suppose Big Ticket doesn’t count, that had celebrity contestants every week. If it doesn’t, I think this is the first celebrity special of a lottery quiz.
That was my reasoning as well (certainly not a “special” if it’s every week).
It’d only really work with cash prizes, which rules out quite a lot of lottery shows really.
Arguable: The National Lottery 10th Birthday Celebration, on 6 November 2004. A mash-up of In It to Win It, Wright Around the World, Jet Set, and Winning Lines. I seem to recall that this ended with one of the hosts taking on the Wonderwall for charity.
Thursday night btw 500 Questions up against the big comedy block on CBS (Big Bang Theory et al) and the Red Nose Day special on NBC.
We can probably start calling it 500 Viewers now.
Night 2 – 1.0 rising to 1.1 in the second hour, and a 4% share.
“Solid retention”:
http://tvbythenumbers.zap2it.com/2015/05/22/500-questions-earns-abcs-best-summer-timeslot-rating-since-august-2013-in-adults-18-49/407423/
The Dragon will update later.
I don’t really get this. I don’t understand why it was commissioned or why anyone thought it was any good.
There’s no overarching “hero myth” – becoming a millionaire is a cool achievement; answering 500 question is a process, not really an achievement. Even the “Who will answer 500 Questions?” doesn’t work because you have to caveat it with “(without getting 3 in a row wrong)”. Does anything special happen if anyone gets to question 500? Has this even been explained? Do we even care much if someone drops out at question 241 because they’ve already won a fair amount of money up to question 200?
There’s slightly too many special questions and the rules for each one are so different as to be inelegant. There’s several rules I’d like to see dropped as they – most notably the milestone bonus which just fluffs up your celebration at question 50. “Oh, actually you won slightly more than your total… just because.”
The killer flaw is that the challenger isn’t in the game nearly enough. Maybe something extra happens (on ordinary 10-second questions) if you didn’t get the question right but your challenger did.
While the “three wrongs” rule offers some moments of tension, in a way it works as a massive anti-climax near the end because you’re getting up to 3 chances to finish off your opponent.
I think the game could work if they made the game more challenging and cut it down to 100 Questions because you’d be more likely to stick with a contestant for that kind of journey. It’s still quite long at that – let’s remember that people tuned out of the early rounds of Millionaire because they found it boring – and that was only 15 questions!
Even “Three wrong in a row and you are GONE!” is a rubbish catchphrase.
And Ken Jennings probably answered 10-15,000 questions on his Jeopardy run, anyway.
I very much suspect KJ was one of the touchstones on which this was commissioned. But J! is a game that happens to create things like that as part of its decades-long history. Trying to manufacture that kind of event immediately and saying “you’re about to see TV history” is all a bit silly.
(Before people write in, the actual number is closer to 4-4.5k, maths suggests.)
actually ken delivered over 2700 correct responses.
Does anyone know what Big Brother got on +1 both on Thursday and last night?
The total viewers including +1 were 1.0m on Thursday and 1.1m on Friday. Don’t know how that breaks down I’m afraid.
Does Who Dares Wins always leave the whole lottery segment to the end of the show? I genuinely can’t remember!
Also it was a shame they couldn’t knock together a third ‘celebrity’ couple to replace the losing team from the first battle, though I’m sure it was more than a little bit rigged so all the charities got £25k! 😉
No; they usually have Thunderball just before the second money list.
The draw on Eurovision finals day is different. Sales remain open until 7.30, the operators need some time to make sure everything’s in order, and they cannot over-run.
I know different quiz shows have different prize budgets per show but Who Dares Wins gave out the equivalent of about 40/50 episodes of Pointless Celebrities last night (albeit with 2 rather easy prize money lists)