The other day for no special reason, I watched the first episode of a new prime-time game show called We Are Family. As I recall when this was announced, it was to have been hosted by Jamie Foxx and his daughter Corinne but Mr. Foxx has been having medical-type problems so the job has passed to Anthony Anderson and his mother, Doris. We Are Family struck me as a good half-hour game show which, unfortunately, is in an hour time slot.
Obviously intended to ape some of what makes The Masked Singer so popular, We Are Family is a game show with musical performances and a guess-the-celebrity gimmick. There are three main performers in the hour. Each performer is an unknown but they have a famous relative. The main performer does a song on their own which segues into a duet with their famous relative who is seen in silhouette inside something called The Sphere.
100 (I think) contestants in the audience get to figure out (or maybe just guess) who the Mystery Relative is and then everyone who's right shares in the prize money in the first and second rounds. One of them then has the third round to themselves and can win up to $100,000 if they can immediately guess who the third Mystery Relative is based on their voice and some clues. The gent who had this opportunity on Show #1 took home $75,000 for getting the correct answer on the second clue.
This might be a cute little show if they did it in 30 minutes or if they filled the hour with enough show to attain the pace of The Price is Right. But not that much actually happens and to pad out the time, they have Mr. Anderson saying the same things over and over and over and over…and then they have his mother saying them and then he says them again and…
Well, I'll give it a few more chances. I also finally sampled Celebrity Name That Tune, which has been on for a few years now, naming tunes and often stretching the definition of "celebrity" fairly thin. That seems like a fun show…and it was not as reliant on recent songs as I guess I expected. I actually recognized enough of 'em to hold my interest for the hour. I'm not sure if I'll be back but I liked it more than I expected.
My favorite recent prime-time game show, The Wall, may have reached its end on American TV. They recently finished airing Season 5 which I suspect was recorded a long time ago and it was a difficult year. A few decades back, a friend of mine was working on Win Ben Stein's Money and she told me (correctly) it would probably be its last season.
Why did she think that? Because the ratings were dropping. Why did she think that was? Two reasons: They hadn't been able to find the right host after Jimmy Kimmel left it…and Ben was winning too often. She said, "Audiences want to see the contestants walk away with decent winnings more often than not and that's not happening." That was also the problem with the short-lived Million Dollar Money Drop game show. It felt like no one was ever going to win a million dollars or anything close to it.
The Wall has had a rough fifth season. It's a show where people stand to win a million-bucks-plus or if not, they usually at least go home with a few hundred thousand. In the fourteen shows aired, one couple won $1.3 million (significantly on the first show aired this season), one couple left with zero and the rest went home with between $100,000 and $250,000. That consolation moola is still a nice piece o'change but not on a show where the players seem extra-extra-deserving. And not on a show where anyone would feel like a loser taking away much less than seven figures.
I liked the show when players were winning more and I think Chris Hardwick is one of the best game show hosts to come along in quite some time. But I haven't heard anything about a Season 6. If there is one, I bet it'll have some rule changes. And someone will win over a million on the first episode they air.