No, not like they did back in the 1950’s… you could get into a lot of trouble for that. Instead, what changes would you make to today’s game shows to make for better viewing? In particular, I’m thinking of the two remaining U.S. primetime non-“reality” broadcast game shows, imports Who Wants to Be a Millionaire and Weakest Link, although feel free to jump in if you think you can fix, say, The Price Is Right.
I’ll start with Weakest Link. My main problem with Weakest Link – and I suspect this frustrates most people as much as it frustrates me – is that the player who best answers the questions never wins. It’s okay that the best player isn’t guaranteed to win. That’s interesting. It’s NOT okay that the best player ALWAYS gets gonged on the last vote. That’s maddening. I think there are a few different possible solutions for this. My choice would be to let the audience participate with a Millionaire-type device, except the audience would be choosing a contestant to protect. Any votes by the contestants against the player getting the most audience votes for that round would be thrown out. This would force contestants to use more strategy and would offer the best player a better chance of winning.
As for Millionaire, I think the main problem is, of all things, the contestants. I don’t have data to back it up, but Millionaire seemed to have better players earlier on, and the best players are certainly the most entertaining to play along with at home. If I’m not mistaken, contestants can still get on the show by calling in, but more shows are filled by people who audition to be on. The auditions allow for the slate of contestants to be more demographically diverse and arguably more interesting than the parade of nerds that enter the phone contest, but how often do you get to see even a $250,000 question these days? I think a particular show will have either audition-people or phone-people only, so viewers wind up questioning either the talent pool or the gene pool. My solution, short of strictly using phone contestants, would be to simply have 5 contestants from each source on each show. I think the more talented phone contestants would make it to the chair most of the time, which I would favor, but there would also be enough audition-types playing so that no one has to feel like they’re watching a meeting of the A/V club.
Yes? No? What else?
