So RTL Plus started last week, a new German channel aimed at mid-40s females offering up reruns of court shows and new versions of old quizzes, beginning with Jeopardy and Familien Duell right now with Glucksrad and Ruck Zuck following later.
Interestingly they’re all filmed on the same set, reconfigured as necessary. If you want to watch them you will need to point your VPN at TV Now.
Jeopardy is the more interesting of the two current offerings. The podiums feel teeny tiny (perhaps tellingly when they reveal the Final Jeopardy responses they’re done in a box-off). They use the US music and stings, although I think the stings need to be mixed a bit higher.
Yeah sorry, I took this whilst watching from the sofa.
Two points of note. First of all the clues are in the main quite lengthy – this example is by no means the longest on offer. The font size scales to fit the screen. Perhaps unsurprisingly they only got through about 60% of the clues in Doppel Jeopardy.
Secondly the clue values are weird in a way that I can’t quite determine if it’s ingenious or madness: €10, €20, €50, €100, €250 as standard. Ignore the fact that this is budgeted for a digital channel (it feels like all these games have a average prize budget of around €3,000 an episode) that is one top heavy board. On the one hand, €250 has never felt so exciting. On the other hand €250 is the only one that really seems to matter. It is interestingly telling that in the episode viewed the contestants shied away from selecting the top-tier question in most cases.
Familien Duell (Family Fortunes/Feud/whatever) is mainly very pink. It keeps the original German theme and sound effects and piggy bank motif, and seems to offer €6,000 daily with returning champions.
I’m certainly looking forward to seeing Glucksrad as that was one of my favourite German shows in the nineties (and probably my favourite version of the format full stop). Right now the channel is free to air but will be going behind a paywall in due course. It sounds like many of these shows will get an airing on the main RTL channel at weekends.
Ruck Zuck is probably better known in English speaking circles as [Bruce Forsyth’s] Hot Streak, in case you were wondering.
I actually think the set is basically the same is a smart idea- saves money for a short-term run like this (Jeopardy and FD are only supposed to go about 4-6 weeks before Glucksrad and Ruck Zuck take over)…ITV should do that for their summer tryout shows.
Is the 10-20-50-100-250 for the first round or the second? I agree the amounts seem odd- 25-50-75-100-125 and 50-100-150-200-350 makes a little more sense (and that’s what they used in the short-lived 1978 US J! version- though that version had no FJ and an ill-conceived bonus round)
Round one (Dopple Jep is precisely that).
If you stuff up a 500 question you’ve basically blown it.
Yeah, that’s a 1000 swing right there- and the last question in a category is worth more than the other four combined (the fourth question is worth more than the first three combined). Wonder why they went that way..
The game I saw saw a guy go 400 in the hole towards the end, little reasonable chance to get back from that.
It is a bit cheaper than 1:2:3:4:5 ratio I suppose, but I can’t think of any other version that does this. German formatting is usually pretty sound, I do wonder what the thinking is.
actually if you went 25-50-75-100-125 it would be less than 10-20-50-100-250 (375 vs 430), and considering you said they don’t get through all the questions anyway they might have been able to get away with 50-100-150-200-250…
Fair enough, although I was working on the basis of pick your top value and work backwards.
I think both formats are done pretty well by RTL and agree the money values in Jeopardy are very unbalanced.
I’m not usually a fan of the Family Fortunes format and the ‘funny’ questions that always seem to get forced in. Luckily it’s played straight here and the presenter is really good too – she adds a lot of energy to the small studio and simple game.
Looking forward to Glücksrad too – I’m
too young to remember the previous German version but love the format elsewhere!
Full episodes are quite hard to come by (although there are lots of bits of it on Youtube).
The Golden Age (for me anyway) is their mid-90s set from Berlin. Everything’s just so *slick*, but it still feels natural:
https://youtu.be/3nJlC372NwI
Edit: full titles as that vid cuts them off:
https://youtu.be/02i3QDgrISY
Thanks! Enjoyed that – some nice touches.
I wonder if they will still have turney-letters when it returns or have upgraded to the touch screens too.
No it will be touch screen, the same screen they’re using for the other shows.
1000 Heartbeats officially coming back for a third series, apparently.
Oooh, that’s good news. I like that one. Been wondering if it was coming back. Or still on.
France 2’s ordered a new quiz from Nagui’s Air Productions – ‘Trouvez l’intrus’/Spot the intruder – which sounds like a bit of a rehash of ‘Tout le monde veut prendre sa place’. 5 contestants go up against a reigning champion facing multiple-choice questions where they’re looking for the wrong rather than the correct answer.
Interesting, it’s one of those that was being piloted for English speaking markets at the same time. If they keep that set, the end game has a really impressive gimmick involving mapped 3D projection.
Frankly I’m surprised it got ordered based on what I saw, because that aside, it’s a fairly straight quiz.
Affari Tuoi returns, now with 100% more contestants!
and with new values on the board below the big red ones.
now you can win “a coffee with Flavio” or “a bitter with the adjudicator”
I’m really happy about this game show slot. I have watched it whenever I had the time, although it’s not perfect. But the only other daily game show we have is “Wer weiss denn sowas?” on ARD and that is a celebrity useless knowledge quiz that has been running for about 100 episodes straight now. And it really isn’t interesting anymore (12 questions per show plus one final question where the money won (up to 3000€ per team) is gambled just like final jeopardy and an episode lasts almost an hour).
I love Jeopardy. I didn’t think our most famous Strictly (though called Let’s Dance here) judge could pull this off, but you don’t need much talent to host this, I suppose (you don’t have to read at high speed or have much chatter with the contestants). Familienduell is not really my cup of tea (don’t know why I loved it so much as a child), but Inka Bause (also host of Farmer wants a Wife (still a big thing here)) is really great and the casting was good as well. I really love watching both shows.
The ratings are a rollercoaster ride, first episodes had 1,6% market share (very German from me to talk about the share instead of viewers) some episodes had 0,1% and it’s up and down ever since (at least that’s what I’ve been told). Airing repeats on RTL Saturday afternoon hasn’t been so succesful on the first weekend with shares around 10%, but they will extend it to 4 hours when Ruck Zuck and Glücksrad will start airing on RTL Plus, so they seem happy about the cheap fillers regardless.