The folks behind Deal or No Deal have a new show with some of the same spirit. It's called 1 Vs. 100 and the first episode debuted last Friday night. Four more have been taped and they run the next four Fridays.
I haven't set the TiVo for a Season Pass to grab them because I didn't particularly enjoy the first broadcast. First of all, I'm getting a little tired of the unrelenting sameness of Deal or No Deal so the last thing I need in my week is another show with a similar look 'n' feel.
Second, one of the reasons that Deal or No Deal can be a frustrating thing to watch is that so many contestants fall so far short of the million dollar prize, some of them very early on in games that continue for 40 minutes after the top prizes are eliminated. 1 Vs. 100 has a million buck top cash award but it's hard to believe anyone will get near it. After each question, you have to risk everything to go on, which is not how these shows usually work — and for a good reason. Who Wants To Be A Millionaire? is configured so you can see the next question, decide not to answer it and then walk away richer than when you arrived…and even if you get one of the top money questions wrong, you don't leave with zero. Some of the other shows that materialized in the wake of Millionaire's success let you know the category of the next question before you had to decide if you were going to risk everything and go for it. Even on Deal or No Deal, deciding to gamble is usually to chance that, if you pick wrong, your next bank offer might drop from six figures to five.
This all encourages risk-taking. But on 1 Vs. 100, one wrong answer and you go home with bupkis. They probably don't even have a copy of a home game to give you as a lovely parting gift. So let's say you're doing great and you crank it up to half a million dollars. Are you going to risk it all to hope that the next question won't be about a movie that you didn't see or a sport you've never followed? Remember that in order to win the million, you not only have to get every question right but everyone else in the "mob" of 100 has to get one wrong. To further drive home how unlikely this is, they keep showing shots of Ken Jennings, who's one of those hundred, and reminding you how much money he won on Jeopardy!
So all that's the second of my reasons why the show didn't grab me. The third would involve the lighting effects and all the little "suspenseful" music stings, which are becoming a real cliché on shows like this. The ones on 1 Vs. 100 sounded to me like the ones on every other show of this kind. It's like the producers of The Weakest Link had a big yard sale and the people behind this new show stopped off and picked up their audio tracks real cheap, plus some pieces for their set.
Lastly, Bob Saget is a very funny comedian, especially if you like filth. Really, he is. But he did the first episode with that "I'm too hip to be doing a show like this" attitude that has killed almost every Dennis Miller TV venture for me. He didn't seem to care about the game and if he doesn't, I certainly don't. Someone let me know if it gets any better in succeeding weeks…but I have a hunch it won't.