For no visible reason, I found myself enjoying the debut episode of Deal or No Deal, a prime-time game show hosted earlier this evening by Howie Mandel. The premise is pretty simple: There are 26 briefcases held by 26 models, each case containing a secret dollar amount ranging from one cent to one million dollars. A contestant is selected from the audience and picks one briefcase. He or she now "owns" that amount but doesn't yet know what it is. The contestant then calls out numbers to open the briefcases that were not chosen, one by one. Each time a low amount is revealed, hopes are raised that the secret amount is high. Each time a high amount is revealed…well, that lowers the odds that the contestant has a high amount in his or her briefcase.
Every so often, a mysterious "banker" phones Mr. Mandel and offers to buy the as-yet-unrevealed amount of cash from the contestant and the contestant must decide "deal or no deal" (hence, the name). The offers are calculated to make the choice harder and harder, and to make the contestant sweat and squirm. The lady tonight had several members of her family on stage with her to offer advice and they were sweating and squirming a lot, too. She turned down many higher offers — one for $138,000 — because though she knew by then she didn't have the million dollar prize in her case, there was still a chance the $500,000 one was in it. However, by the time it got down to the last decision, she knew she either had $500 or $50,000 and when the "banker" offered $25,000, she grabbed it…a good move since it turned out she had the smaller amount.
In broad strokes, this sounds a lot like Let's Make a Deal or maybe the Geoff Edwards version of Treasure Hunt. On the one hand, those shows had more opportunity for variations, whereas Deal or No Deal sounds like it'll be exactly the same game, over and over. On the other hand, Deal or No Deal doesn't delight in humiliating the contestants the way those other contestants did, and Mandel didn't have the genial smarminess of Edwards or Monty Hall.
Matter of fact, I thought Howie did a good job, though I was amused by the opening which had him in a bank vault, talking as if he was surrounded by millions in genuine currency. At the end of the program, if you froze your TiVo, you could read the following statement in a very tiny font…
The host's statement at the top of the program regarding the "high security vault" and any statements regarding "cash" being inside the briefcases were scripted for dramatic purposes. There was no cash on the program set. The producers determine and communicate all bank offers.
Four more episodes run tonight, tomorrow night and so on through the week. I'm TiVoing them to see how long it takes me to get bored with it. I'm guessing half past Wednesday.