Ever been up there? I can understand someone with a few thousand bucks in prizes in the pot spending a piddling $250 just to be sure. I’m more bugged by people who can’t take a second to read the answer correctly.
He didn’t seem pretentious to me, the little I saw of him. But, did you know that when he blows an answer they retape him reading it so he comes across as perfect?
A program that shows that there is an infinite supply of innumerate morons in the US.
Nah, using a lifeline then just makes us speculate you’re a moron. Blowing a $100 question proves you’re a moron.
Goodness, the vitriol that drops around here. :eek:
There is Jeopardy!, the only game show that requires actual brain cells, there is Wheel of Fortune, which almost manages to require them, then there is the rest of the litter, which require nothing but the willingness to look totally foolish on TV. YMMV.
My beef with Wheel of Fortune is that they make the contestants (and Vanna) clap like trained seals while the wheel is in motion. Plus some of the bonus rounds are virtually impossible and some are no-brainers, which doesn’t seem fair.
I agree that Alex is pretentious, especially when he overdoes the foreign phrases. But I wish him the best in his recovery. Yesterday I told my wife “This person had a heart attack.” She replied “what?” and I told her, “sorry but the correct question is ‘Who is Alex Trebek?’”
Press Your Luck had one requirement: you had to shout “Big Bucks No Whammies” every time you pushed the button. Plus the questions were the easiest of any game show with the possible exception of Jokers Wild.
I like Deal or No Deal. But I think they’re overplaying it now like they did with Millionaire. The kiss of death for this as it was for other game shows will be when they have celebs play for charity.
They all suck to a degree because you have to be perky, photogenic, and interesting to get on the air. How about a show for the rest of us to get on?
Millionaire - I hate it when contestants discuss what they think the answer is, and then proceed to ask the audience. Hello? You just predisposed anyone in the audience who hasn’t a clue to go with your guess.
Yeah, Cash Cab is excellent. I could never play it though; riding through the streets of New York ties my stomach in knots!
The only game I watch with any regularity is Millionaire. My husband and I don’t even bother to pay attention or attempt answers until it gets up to four thousand or so.
People aggravate me when they don’t use their lifelines in what I consider the proper way, such as using the 50/50 and then another lifeline on the same question. If you don’t intend to guess, why did you start with the 50/50?
I also see a lot of contestants who ask to use a lifeline as soon as they see the question, when there’s a good chance they could figure the answer out if they’d just think a damn minute.
You should not ask the audience the question about the history of architecture. Ask them the one about the location of Jessica Simpson’s secret freckle.
Don’t get me started on the Phone-A-Numbnuts who stammer during the entire call or phrase their answer in the form of a sentence so long that the time runs out before they’ve given any clue as to what they were going to say.
Wheel Of Fortune…Don’t use your Free Spin at the start of a new puzzle. It’s meant to be used if you think you can get the answer with one or two more spins. When you use it near the beginning the chances that you’ll get a letter wrong is still to high and all your doing is helping everyone else out. Even worse when there’s too little of the puzzle compleated for it to be worthwhile, but too much compleated that if your guess a wrong letter it won’t make it back to you.
Don’t Forget the Lyrics/Millionair/any game with 'lifelines." You’re by yourself, there’s no one you’re playing against, if you get it wrong your done, if you don’t know the answer use a damn life line, this isn’t the time to guess. There’s no point in saving your life lines for the harder questions later if you’re not going to make it to those questions.
You do realize that if they don’t know what the letter is when there are all vowels left their chances do not improve measurably by buying a vowel. In fact, by taking the chance on buying the wrong vowel, you risk money and your turn. Who would do that with only vowels left? That’s right, only somebody who already knows the answer! Such stupidity.
Last night I had it on for noise, and some cat with $750 bought a vowel when there was only one consonant left, then immediately solved the puzzle. If the vowel helped her she was a moron. It’s almost as if they think that they can’t solve the puzzle without filling in all the blanks and straight-out reading it.
Player: What is La Boheem?
Alex: We’ll accept that. It’s actually La Boheme, you unwashed prole.
He has that certain smarm that I cannot stand. It’s as if he’s giving some chump a shot a some mad loot if they can only prove that they are as smart as he is.
You’re probably right of course- I was being naive for thinking less mindless chatter would mean more questions!
And I agree about the “funny” choice D for the first question on Millionaire- it wouldn’t be so bad, if it ever once was even close to being witty or funny.
Missed the edit window…I also recall one obnoxious prat on Millionaire who had the balls to ask the audience and then say “please don’t vote if you are not sure of the answer”- fuck you buddy, you don’t make the rules.
Yeah, that pretty much guarantees that people will hit buttons at random to fuck with you.
I don’t like all the talk about contestants’ lives, either – I want more game. I think I read one time that one of the things that the producers of Jeopardy look for in choosing contestants is interesting anecdotes to tell Alex – if that’s true, I simply can’t imagine how boring the rejects are.
He also once complained that he was getting Carpal Tunnel Syndrome from having to pick up that phone seven or eight times an hour. :rolleyes: Sorry, my opinion of the show is pretty close to Sampiro’s.
Actually, there are second and third prizes (and fourth and fifth… every team gets something), they just aren’t mentioned and are a lot less than the 1 million first prize.
As for the bottlenecks, there are a couple of reasons that TPTB have said they have them. The main problems are logistical. Phil meets the teams at the end of each leg. If the teams are too spread out then he has to basically be in two different places at the same time. There was a leg in the second season where one team took a ridiculous routing and wound up over a day behind the other teams. Apparently they barely had time to get him from meeting them to where he had to be to meet the first team finishing the next leg.
Also, even though you rarely see them each team is (obviously) accompanied by a camera and sound crew. The crews rotate among the teams each leg (to minimize any impact that a crew may have on an individual team’s performance) and this is most easily done if everyone is in the same place at more-or-less the same time.
Then there was the end of the first season where one team fell about a day behind the others and because of flight schedules had no chance of catching up. This turned a three-way finish into a two-way finish. The bottlenecks are designed to prevent this as well.
Another annoying thing about The Amazing Race is the casting of the teams. It always makes you question “Are they really that stupid? Where do they find these people? Do they purposely choose people who are overly dramatic and get lost easily?”
I think it would be much more interesting to have people picked in a random drawing each year. Pick 22 random people (no teams) that applied and have them all show up. At that point they randomly draw names to see who they are paired up with.
So you get 11 teams of strangers from various walks of life who aren’t filtered through producers.
Would be much more interesting in my opinion.
Exactly. When I was on Millionaire the producers told us all to walk through the questions. Don’t just say, “it’s ‘C,’” tell Meredith and the audience why it’s C. And it’s schtick, yes, but also calming for the contestant.
Trebek is a nice guy, at least he was during my tapings. He talked to the audience during breaks and answered a ton of questions. Some hosts disappear during the breaks, but not ol’ Alex. Not sure where all the complaints about him being pretentious are all about.
I can’t speak for the tripe that Fox and NBC are putting out, but the whole point of Wheel of Fortune is that the audience is playing along at home. So you don’t want every contestant to solve the puzzle instantly. And buying vowels is the only way to keep control of the board without spinning, which of course has a few potentially bad outcomes. The entry exam for the show is pretty easy. They’re looking for engaging, excitable contestants, people that the audience will root for. Smarmy know-it-alls aren’t really their bag.
This is old news, because I think the Pyramid shows ($10,000, $25,000, $50,000, whatever) are all off the air. But during the actual Pyramid round, (where you sat in the chair and had to guess the answers from the list your partner gave you), you had 60 seconds to complete the the Pyramid. And every time you got one right, THE AUDIENCE CLAPPED FOR THREE OR FOUR SECONDS!! OK, you’ve got to guess six of them. If during the first five, there were three seconds of applause for each one, you’ve blown 25% of your allotted time. This had to be a deliberate tactic of the producers, because suely at some point a contestant would have said, “Please tell the audience to hold their applause until I’m finished so I can use all my time!”
It’s funny you should mention that — especially since this isn’t Great Debates, and since I’ve seldom seen anyone measure how much someone is loved by how wealthy they are — but I’ve always thought of it as an allegory for atheism, with people bothering to attach meaning to random electromagnetic collisions suspended in gravitational fields.
