Boy there were a lot of them on last night. Regis went through half of the Fastest Fingers contestants in the hour, and he started off with a contestant from the last show.
I really pulled my hair out at the guy who misread the $2000 question (“In which country do they drive on the right? Japan, Australia, Canada, or New Zealand?”). He started off soundling like he was working through it, but he answered with what I though was his eliminated answer.
What would Brian Boitano do / If he was here right now /
He’d make a plan and he’d follow through / That’s what Brian Boitano would do.
Hey, TV loves to clone off of a successful ratings generator with cheaper, crummier, poorly thought out knock-offs. I would think they would eventually realize the shows burn out quickly, but I suppose they never will.
Have you voted for your favorite, huggable Mullinator today?
I hate it when people screw up on Millionaire and still have lifelines, what’s worng with these people? Like that one woman and the golf question,“Oh I don’t know anything about golf.” Then she answers it antyway and loses, geez!
They do know they’ll eventually burn out. They’re after that short-term, instant profit. TV is like too many other American businesses, always with their eye on turning a profit in the next quarter, rather than concentrating on long-term goals. There are, of course, American businesses who can see more then three months ahead, but the number seems to be dwindling.
Oh, and the other thing is that these game shows cost much less to produce, even with million-dollar prizes. I read recently where NBC’s 21 costs, on the average, $600,000 per one-hour episode, whereas Friends costs $3,000,000 per half-hour episode. Game shows have only one “performer”, the host, whereas sitcoms have several.
It would not surprise me if the frequency of Millionaire is reduced to once-a-week soon.
Did anyone else see the story today about how the underwriters of the show (who are the British Lloyds’ PLC, I seem to recall) are suing because the questions are so mindbogglingly simple that big payouts are too likely. The UK version of the show has never had a million pound winner, and the ultimate questions are extraordinarily difficult – they ask fairly detailed maths and physics stumpers. Can you imagine this sort of thing on the US show?
I definitely agree that the questions are waaaaaay too easy for the Millionaire show. They do cover many different subjects, meaning that to get to 1 million dollars you would have to be learned in many subjects (such as cheesy TV commercials in the past and past TV shows; this isn’t true knowledge, just “if you’ve seen it you know it” questions). Millionaire should stick to three or four subjects and make the questions difficult.
cleosia–did you see who the millionaire guy picked? She wasn’t exactly a looker but neither was he. That show just degrades the sacrament of matrimony. It lessens the meaning of marriage. It is a crock of crap. Twenty bucks says that marriage doesn’t last for one year. Any takers?
