What would be exciting, amusing, interesting or nightmarish?
For instance, I envision knife fighting on “Survivor”.
I also am thinking of something with a pool of parents of sick kids who compete head to head for exotic, expensive medical treatment. How far will they go for their kid?
Also, how risky can you make these things? Can you do things where there is a VERY GOOD CHANCE they will die in an attempt at a huge payoff? I’m sure you would need a herd of lawyers to stay on the air for more than a couple of weeks, but maybe you can tape it in an offshore, more flexible legal environment.
They set you up in an apartment. A single mother or father. You have two children. You have to live on a minimum wage job. Pay rent, buy food, raise your children at minimum wage.
How about this? All the various creators of reality shows are dropped on a desert island along with the various TV show critics. Scattered around the island are assorted weapons and piles of food. Also hidden on the island is a boat large enough for one person to use to get back to civilization. I think the rest is pretty simple. (Oh, and when the lucky person makes it back to civilization, the boat’s sank as soon as they step ashore and the island’s immediately used for bombing practice by the US Navy!) The pay-off for everyone’s pretty obvious in this one I think.
We give a bunch of guys ancient weapons, like swords and spears and war-nets. Preferably the ancient short sword known as the “gladius” in classical Latin. Then we put them in a big arena and force them to fight to the death. It’d have to be a really big arena, though – one that’s absolutely Collosal. That way, we can use it for chariot races during the off-season. And just to spice things up, every once in a while during this combat, we release a hungry lion into the arena that these gladius-wielders have to fight. Oh, and if a contestant is rendered defenseless, his conqueror can look up to the Judges Box in the grandstands, where a judge can decide to signal the conqueror to finish off the losing contestant by pointing his thumb downward.
I already came up with this in another thread, but I’ll hash it out again.
"Real Survivor" would, like Survivor I, take place on a tropical island. The object of the game is for the sixteen players to survive sixty days on the island without getting killed. Anyone who survives gets an equal share of the $10,000,000 prize money.
In Real Survivor the players are not put into tribes or teams or any of that crap. They are all placed on separate parts of the island with nothing but the clothes on their backs, some matches, some twine, and two days’ supply of food. The island has hundreds of hidden cameras and mikes. Other than the cameras there is no contact between the contestants and the outside world.
The kicker is that you’re allowed to kill the opposing players. If you kill your opponents then the prize money will be split fewer ways and you win. Every person you slay makes your jackpot go higher - if you live. On the other hand, trying to kill your opponents obviously entails risk; they might kill you first. This presents your contestants with some fascinating strategic decisions; should they slay each other, or try to stay hidden and just collect whatever their share is? Should they offer an alliance to another player… or can they trust them? Each game would likely have different dynamics; some would be free-for-alls, but some would probably develop into two or three loosely allied teams fighting each other, with some terrific backstabbing thrown into the mix.
Just to spice things up, incentives can be added to the game and announced by loudspeaker. If the contestants seem a little unwilling to mix it up, offer $250,000 extra for every kill a contestant makes. Randomly assign two players to be partners and ban them from killing each other, but pick two people on opposite sides of the island and see if they can meet up before everyone else is dead. After they’ve been surviving together for three weeks and have bonded and love one another as brothers, offer them a $500,000 bounty on each other’s head. If one or two contestants are killing a lot of the other contestants early on, give the players a special bonus for killing someone who has a lot of kills themselves.
Man, I’d tune in to see that, wouldn’t you? Have Pat Sumerall and John Madden announce the event.
PAT: And here’s Terri, the 25-year-old orthodontist’s assistant from Sunnyvale, CA, and she’s sneaking up on Jim, the 33-year-old bus driver from Montpelier, and… ooh, she bludgeons his head in with a boulder! But look out, here comes Dawn, the 40-year-old schoolteacher from Miami, and she’s caught Terri unawares and is throttling her with a vine!
JOHN: Let’s look at the replay - see, Terri comes in like there, and here’s Dawn here (Madden draws white squiggly lines all over the screen) and she doesn’t see her and BOOOOM!
PAT: That’s gotta hurt.
Nope, no chariot races at the Coliseum – that’s what the Circus Maximus was for (as seen, with embellishments, in Ben Hur).
They did, however, supposedly flood the Coliseum from time to time and have gladitorial naval battles in it. Now THAT I’d pay to see. Bring in Ivy League crew teams, arm them, and let the preps ram each other!
Alternatively, we do Real Junkyard Wars – Two or more teams fight a multi-episode war for control of a junkyard. Sort of like live-action Civilization, with the teams developing technologies, fighting over resources, trading, etc.
