"Ladies Let's Salsa!"

I can’t help wondering if William Shatner – back when he was doing Romeo And Juliet at Stratford – ever thought that he’d end up as the over the top host of a cheesy game show. Maybe. Back in those days the Canadian acting community was small, it was a buyer’s market, and there were a lot of people who were willing to just about any job – Shatner did one week on the Canadian version of Howdy Doody because James Doohan’s agent couldn’t agree with the CBC on a contract for his client and the guy who got the gig couldn’t start until a week after the series was supposed to start. In the 1950s actors in Canada had one rule: “Show me the money.” Which coincidentally is the name of the cheesy new game show that Shatner is the over the top host of.

People writing about Television, and indeed pitching shows, tend to look for something known to compare the shows to. Maybe it’s the whole mindset that “imitation is the sincerest form of television.” The quote is from the legendary radio comedian Fred Allen, although I suspect that at least one of the people who used the quote with regard to Show Me The Money has no idea who Fred Allen was. More than one reviewer compared to Show Me The Money to Deal Or No Deal although I’m not absolutely clear on the reasoning for this. I mean sure, there are similarities. Prize amounts are revealed by extremely attractive young women; thirteen dancing girls to be precise although why they had to be dancing girls is beyond me. I can imagine the pitch meeting though: “Imagine thirteen, count’em, thirteen beautiful dancing girls.” Almost makes me think of those girly shows at the fair when I was too young to get into them. That’s where the similarity stops. In Deal Or No Deal you pick a briefcase and then spend the rest of your time deciding which case to pick next and answering offers from the Banker. Show me the money is more complex.

It may in fact be too complex. Players are given a “header” which is the first word or word of three questions, A, B, or C. The player then picks a question to answer but has the option to pass on the question twice on each header. They must provide an answer for one question in each category. Once the player has answered a question, but usually before the player is told whether the answer is right or wrong, the player must pick a dancer who will reveal the prize amount by opening a scroll placed in a holder in front of them. If the answer is correct that amount will be added to the player’s prize pool; if the answer is wrong that amount will be subtracted from the pool. The game ends when the player has either answered six questions correctly (+) or incorrectly (-). There are twelve prize amounts ranging – in $20,000 increments – from $20,000 to $250,000. One dancer has the “killer card”. If the player’s answer was correct there’s no penalty and neither a + or a – is added to the players list. If the answer was wrong however, the player is then asked a “sudden death” question. Again if the player answers correctly there is no change in status. If the answer is incorrect the player loses everything that has been won and the game ends immediately. And from time to time, for no apparent reason, everybody dances. Including Shatner, who dances like a 75 year-old man trying desperately to look hip.

The first, 90 minute, episode featured two contestants and surprisingly both finished their games. The first contestant on the show was perhaps the gayest human being ever to come out of the state of Oklahoma. He carried a “man purse” or “Murse” which contained some lip balm and his prized Shania Twain ticket. He claims to be a huge fan and amazingly enough it came into play during the game – he passed on a question where the correct answer was Shania Twain. He played the game quite well, getting his first four questions correct and at one point looking like a contender for a prize of over a million dollars before his luck turned slightly and he ended up with just over $500,000. Still he managed to show the quality of the Oklahoma educational system by informing us that Amsterdam is in Denmark. The next contestant wasn’t so lucky. He was a Commander in the US Navy, a fighter pilot stationed at “Top Gun” (because picking a pilot who flew off of the USS Enterprise would be just too much of a coincidence). He had a rough time of it, starting in a slight hole but recovering and building up a small pot…which he proceeded to lose on one question. He built his money up again until he ran into “the killer card.” He was forced to face the “sudden death question” and it was better suited to the guy with the “murse” – What was the name of the man who became known as “Mr. Liza Minelli” after he married her? He lost the money but probably reassured a whole lot of people by not knowing the answer to that one.

I’m not sure if this show would have gotten on the air if it weren’t for the presence of William Shatner, and I’m not sure whether or not that qualifies as a good thing. The rules are complicated but there is the germ of a good idea here. The questions are for the most part challenging unless you’re a geeky know it all (hand raises slowly). But it’s the sheer insanity of people suddenly starting to dance for no more reason than Shatner shouting something like “Ladies, let’s Salsa!” A lot of how you feel about this show will depend on how you feel about Shatner – my mother managed about 5 minutes of the show. The over the top personality he adopts for this show is even more extreme than the personality he used for the abortive UPN attempt at bringing Iron Chef to the United States. This isn’t (I sincerely hope) the “real” William Shatner but rather a parody of a parody. In the end I’m not sure how watchable this show will be regardless of how much you like William Shatner. Definitely not my cup of Earl Grey.

There's Always A Gimmick

It used to be that the best game shows in the world came from the United States of American and were exported to the world. Family Feud, Wheel of Fortune and a bevy of others started out in America and migrated elsewhere in the world. There was even a Maori version of Password in New Zealand. But as time went by fewer and fewer game shows were being made in the USA. There's only one daily network game show left - The Price Is Right - and only a handful of syndicated game shows on broadcast TV plus another handful on cable networks including GSN. Instead of buying syndicated game shows, local stations started buying syndicated talk shows like Oprah and Jerry Springer or court shows like Judge Judy or Judge Joe Brown.

At the same time that the game show seemed to be dying out as an American form new shows were appearing in Europe, some of which took a wildly different approach to the form. Part of this was the rise of the "reality competition show" - things like Belgium's The Mole, Sweden's Expedition Robinson, Now Or Neverland and Big Brotherfrom Holland. All of these shows migrated to North America, with Expedition Robinson becoming Survivor and Now Or Neverland turning into Fear Factor. As is obvious from this list American television saw the success that these show had and when producers like Endemol and Mark Burnett brought those shows to American networks they were quite willing to pick the shows up. The popularity of these shows encouraged American networks to look at other types of European shows including game shows. ABC had a hit with an American version of the British hit Who Wants To Be A Millionaire?, hosted by daytime talk show host Regis Philbin, a show which continues today in syndication, hosted by Meredith Viera. NBC brought the BBC series The Weakest Link to the United States, featuring the original British host, journalist and television presenter Anne Robinson. More recently the network brought the Endemol series Deal Or No Deal to America, a show which has versions in 26 other countries. And on Friday NBC introduced another Endemol series, 1 vs. 100.

Known in the Netherlands as Eén Tegen Honderd, 1 vs. 100 bears a strong resemblance to Who Wants To Be A Millionaire? There is a single player and "The Mob" - 100 people with varying degrees of education. The show's host, Bob Saget, asks both The Player and The Mob a multiple choice question with three answers. There are twelve levels of questions with values between $100 and $10,000. The Mob answers the question in secret after which the Player answers the question publicly. If the Player answers the question correctly, an amount of money equal to the number of members of The Mob who got the answer wrong times the value of the question at that level is placed into a pool. The Player can either take the money or again face The Mob. If The Player answers the a question incorrectly the money in the pool is split between the surviving members of The Mob. The Player has two "Helps" that can be used at any point during the game. The first time The Player uses a Help he/she selects one of the three answers to the question and may ask one of the people in The Mob who gave that answer for an explanation of why that answer was given. This would seem to be a combination of Millionaire's "Phone-a-Friend" and "Ask The Audience" life lines. The second time The Player uses a Help the "game" (which of course means the producers) selects two members of The Mob. One has entered the correct answer while the other has entered an incorrect answer. The Player can then ask why the two people have chosen their answer. This Help most closely resembles Millionaire's "50/50" life line, since one incorrect answer is always eliminated. If The Player successfully eliminates all 100 members of The Mob, the top prize of $1 million will be awarded. To make it worthwhile for members of The Mob to give correct answers, those who haven't been eliminated before The Player is either defeated or walks away with the cash stay to compete against subsequent players while those who are eliminated are replaced in The Mob.

The show reveals its similarities to Who Wants To Be A Millionaire? early on. The first question asked to the first contestant was "The 2003 movie Seabiscuit featured what kind of animal in the title role? A) one with fins, B) one with paws, C) one with hooves?" Both The Player - a bouncer who wanted to win enough money to buy an engagement ring and hold a really good wedding for his fiancee - and The Mob which included nine teachers, three Deal Or No Deal models, and Jeopardy's biggest winner ever Ken Jennings, all got it right. It was a simple question but as Regis Philbin once revealed the producers of Millionaire would offer very easy questions in the first couple of levels so that kids playing along at home wouldn't feel frustrated. Of course there were some players on that show who didn't know the right answer to those "simple" questions. The Player won his first money at the $500 level when eight members of The Mob didn't know that a "pupu platter" was a type of Polynesian dish frequently served at Chinese restaurants. He picked up over $22,000 at the $1,000 level when the question asked what the name of the (then) current Secretary General of the United Nations would be if it were rendered in the style of the song "The Name Game" (if you're interested it is Kofi, Kofi bo Bofi). In the end the player walked away after completing the $5,000 question, using both of his Helps and winning $135,000. He also eliminated 58 members of The Mob.

I confess that I was intrigued about this show. To say that it is far more complicated than Deal Or No Deal is probably an insult; Candyland is more complicated than Deal Or No Deal. The format gives both The Player and The Mob an incentive for getting the answer right. At the same time both The Player and The Mob have a rooting interest in the player eliminating members of The Mob but eliminating them late in the game. If the player eliminates 30 members of The Mob at the $500 level and goes out at the $1,000 level, the 70 remaining members of The Mob split $15,000, getting $214.28 each. If on the other hand 30 members of The Mob are eliminated at the $5,000 level that adds $150,000 to the pot. Assuming that these were the first eliminations (highly unlikely) that would give the remaining 70 members of The Mob $2,142.85. In other words keeping as many members of The Mob in the game until the higher levels benefits whoever wins the money. While the show doesn't have the mathematical complexities of the seemingly simple Deal Or No Deal - there have been analyses of optimal strategies in that game - it is certainly more of a challenge.

Bob Saget is a perfectly adequate host, nowhere near as manic or eccentric as Howie Mandel can be or as excitable as Regis Philbin. Saget's years hosting America's Funniest Home Videos and his time on Full House make him a comfortable presence as host. He moves around a certain amount and seems relaxed as he eases information out of the players and talks to members of The Mob when The Player uses one of his Helps. The set design is interesting. The set is constructed so that the members of The Mob are seated "stadium style" in front of individual panels of lights which are normally blue but change colour when a member of The Mob gets the answer wrong before their lights go out and they effectively disappear into darkness. The studio audience is seated behind The Player in more conventional TV studio seating so that their perspective is similar to The Player's.

I found myself enjoying the first episode of this series when I eventually watched it. I'd like to see more challenging questions but then that's a common gripe of mine when it comes to this sort of program - I want Jeopardy style questions on the grounds that both players and the audience aren't stupid and that they want to see the players pushed a bit. Barring the sort of overexposure and reliance on gimmicks such as frequent "celebrity" editions that became a problem for shows like Millionaire and Weakest Link I feel that this show could do quite well. In that respect I would say that it is at best a one or two night a week thing. You could easily replace one of the three editions of Deal Or No Deal with 1 vs. 100 which might not be that bad an idea. On the other hand, given the state of the current NBC line up - which is showing more than a small amount of weakness - it is entirely possible that the show will find a spot of its own. I'd offer a qualified recommendation for this even though it is delaying the return of Crossing Jordan.

Celebrity Fun & Games - Well Games Anyway

It's probably fitting that I couldn't review Gameshow Marathon last week. Oh no, it's not because the show got better in the second week although it did...sort of. No, the reason why it's fitting is because it gave me the opportunity to see the opening episode of the eighth season of Celebrity Poker Showdown, a show which is both entertaining and serves as a reminder of what you can do with celebrities - whether A, B, C, or Kathy Griffin class - playing games.

Actually Wednesday's episode of Gameshow Marathon seemed a bit better than the episodes that preceded it. Beat The Clock was a perfect show for this format because it was basically a show full of silly stunts which tended to make people look absurd. Essentially it was a series of party games rather than guessing prices. Plus the original show was old enough that it was new for most of the audience both in the studio an watching at home. Most of the celebrities who participated in the show - Paige Davis, Tim Meadows, Kathy Najimy and Leslie Nielsen - all seemed more animated and having more fun in this episode than they did doing The Price Is Right or Let's Make A Deal, not that it would too hard to exceed their excitement levels in those episodes (the exception was Paige Davis who has a bubbly personality, even if she sometimes dances around like a stripper looking for her pole). There are problems, although again the age of the show means that they aren't as visible as some of them were in the first two episodes. We don't remember Clayton "Bud" Collyer's time hosting Beat The Clock. We may remember him as host of the more intellectual To Tell The Truth - and Ivan and I know him as Superman from the radio Adventures of Superman and both the Fleischer and Filmation Superman cartoons - but for most of us, if we remember Beat The Clock at all it is probably the syndicated version hosted by Jack Narz around 1970. Others have complained that while Ricki Lake is trying hard to get into the spirit of the games she wasn't Bob Barker or Monty Hall, one who is still doing his show and the other who is very well remembered. I, on the other hand, find Ricki extremely annoying - particularly her voice - and she's not a good fit personality wise for doing a game show.

No, the host isn't a problem for me, and the fact that it's celebrities is a minor problem. My problem is I'm not entirely sure what these people are playing for and why it's these celebrities. The celebrities are supposed to be playing for charity but for the life of me I can't tell you what or how their charities are getting. The celebrities aren't being paid off in cash when they win something on the show, they're putting merchandise into a prize pool for a lucky at home winner who text messages in the correct answer to a trivia quiz. Does the celebrity get the monetary value of their prize for his or her charity? I don't know. What I do know is that the winner of the final game - a session of Family Feud - gets $100,000 for their charity. Does that mean that none of the other charities gets any money? Again it's not clear.Then there's the celebrities themselves. Apparently the show is set up so that only six specific celebrities get to try to make money for their charities, even though we saw Betty White, George Foreman and Adam Carolla sitting in the audience of The Price Is Right looking as if they had a chance to play. Carolla got up in the middle of an audience shot for The Price Is Right looking as if he had been promised he'd have a shot at the show and was ticked off that they picked Leslie Nielsen instead. It was all a set up though - White, Foreman, and Carolla, along with Kathy Griffin, Bruce Villanch and Adrianne Curry - are there to be the panel for the Match Game portion of the series and the producers made it clear in their promos who the six celebrities were going to be. Finally there's the game shows themselves. Since game shows tended to have a half hour format - except for the current incarnation of The Price Is Right - there seems to be a tendency to try to stretch the material to fit an hour show, and it isn't working.

It's this lack of clarity, together with a feeling of being set up and the distinct impression that some if not most of the celebrities were just there to keep their profile up and had no interest in the games or in having fun that makes Gameshow Marathon less than enjoyable for me. By comparison Celebrity Poker Showdown was enjoyable for me. The episode I saw last week was the first of the eighth tournament and for the first time was occurring outside of Las Vegas, at the Harrah's casino in New Orleans with winnings going to charities in the New Orleans area and tied to Hurricane Katrina relief. Last week's lineup included Jason Alexander (Seinfeld, and participating in his second tournament), Brian Cranston (Malcolm In The Middle, also in his second tournament), Jamie Bamber (Battlestar Galactica), Susie Essman (Curb Your Enthusiasm), and Kevin Sorbo (Andromeda). The difference between this and Gameshow Marathon was palpable. The celebrities clearly seemed engaged and for the most part interested - the exception seemed to be Sorbo - and having fun playing the game. Presumably doses of Southern Comfort, which had signed on as a sponsor - the "Loser's Lounge" was renamed the "Soco Lime Lounge" - helped that along a little. The objectives were clearly laid out - lose in the first round and your charity gets $5,000, win and you get a shot at the lion's share of the PartyPoker.net $1,000,000 prize pool. For the audience what made the show enjoyable was that these people were playing as badly as most of us play. There are plenty of Poker shows on TV where the viewer can see play the game with a tremendous level of competency, on this show we can see famous people for the most part playing like a bunch of donkeys. Host Dave Foley has settled into his role as genial host and poker ignoramus quite well. In fact he's a reasonably good player and has gone deep in several tournaments. The big change for this season, and some say the weakest part of the show was replacing Phil Gordon - who stated that he decided not to renew his contract because he was tired of commentating on people who play as badly as many of these celebrities - and has been replaced by Phil Helmuth (there are some who claim that Gordon's contract wasn't renewed because they could get Helmuth for a third the money, which seems absurd if you know something about Helmuth - a lot of people suspect he'd want to be paid a dollar more than whatever Gordon was getting). If anything Helmuth is probably to analytical for the show and has yet to develop the chemistry that was so abundant between Gordon and Foley.

CBS has touted Gameshow Marathon as being a British import, which is true as far as it goes. The original show was a special called Ant & Dec's Gameshow Marathon and was shown on the British commercial network ITV as part of the network's 50th anniversary. In other words it was a one shot deal. There was a solid reason for it which CBS seems to be lacking. I don't know if CBS thought that they could make more of the series than just a one shot - I certainly suspect they'd like to - but with what they've done they've certainly not succeeded. I think there are things that they could have done that would have made it more successful. One approach might have been to widen the pool of celebrities; you might not be picked for Price Is Right but you could be on Let's Make A Deal or one of the other preliminary round games, and in the same way if you were picked for Price Is Right and didn't win you wouldn't be able to guarantee that you'd be playing in one of the other shows. Another way to work it would be to select a group of ordinary people and actually play the games for the prizes leading up to the final big windfall for the players who made it to the final round of Family Feud. The truth is however that the format is cumbersome and it is difficult to really grasp who gets what for the people they are representing. The difference between this and Celebrity Poker Showdown is clear. There the format is clear as is exactly what the charities are getting, the pool of participants is wider, the celebrities are having fun and are interacting with each other while competing. And yeah, they're making mistakes and on the whole are doing something that they have no expertise at (although next week's episode features Jennifer "The Unabombshell" Tilley, who won the 2005 World Series Of Poker Women's Event and followed that up with the World Poker Tour's Ladies Night tournament - I would love to see her destroy the rest of the field) and making fools of themselves. But that's why the show is fun and why there have been eight tournaments. I have absolutely know doubt that we won't even see a second run of Gameshow Marathon which for the most part is a good thing. I think my only regret will be that we won't be able to see more Beat The Clock - it was fun in a sort of nostalgic non-bug eating way.

Short Takes - April 30, 2006

Another week of distractions and stuff that needed to get done and kept me away from Blogging.

Oh no, not HER: Meredith Viera will be replaced on The View by Rosie O'Donnell. So now we have a woman named Katie (and is it just me or would she be taken more seriously if she went by the name Katherine?) as the anchor of the CBS Evening News; a woman named Meredith doing puff pieces on Today, and a woman named Rosie doing whatever it is that they do on The View. Now on the whole I don't object that much to O'Donnell - I even think that she can act - but I'm just not sure of how well she's going to play with the other children. I can certainly see her and naive conservative Elisabeth Hasselbach having more than a few confrontations.

Prequels are a coming: While there's some discussion as to what the new Star Trek movie, to be helmed by J.J. Abrams, will be about what we've been told is that it will be a prequel featuring Kirk and Spock at Starfleet Academy. As the article indicates this may not be the case, although Abrams indicates that he's interested in possibly doing something contemporary to the Originals Series. Now it appears that Sci-Fi will be producing a prequel to Battlestar Galactica to be called Caprica. The new series will apparently be more of a family drama focussing on two families, the Adamas and the Graystones and will be set fifty years before the destruction of the Colonies at the time of the development of the first Cylons. Just to be clear this probably means that Bill Adama will probably just be getting ready to graduate...out of diapers. Some people aren't sure that the sequel is a good idea on the grounds that it's too soon or will dilute the franchise. However a combination of the two shows has some potential in keeping a Galactica related show on the air for an increased part of the season as well as giving viewers a sense of what Colonial society was like. It should also be noted of course that Doctor Who will be launching a spin-off this Fall to be called Torchwood (CBC has already signed on as a co-producer).

Don't do the crime if you can't do the time: Michelle Rodriguez, who has most recently been seen on the series Lost has done her time for a drunk driving charge in Hawaii. Rodriguez pleaded guilty to the charge last Tuesday and was sentenced to spend five days in jail and pay a $500 fine, or do 240 hours of community service, Surprisingly to some, Rodriguez opted to pay the fine and do the time, apparently on the grounds that "autograph hounds would hassle her if she did work hours." She went to jail on Tuesday and emerged on Friday, having been given credit for time already served immediately following her arrest. Personally I think there was a bit more to her decision. 240 hours of community service would have meant hanging around Hawaii for twenty to thirty days depending on how many hours she worked a day. Presumably this could have been disruptive to her work schedule. Doing the jail time, which she reportedly spent reading and watching TV, meant that she was free in a week.

Like a Swiss Watch: The Law & Order franchise just keeps chugging along. All three Law & Order shows have received early renewals from NBC, along with Crossing Jordan, Las Vegas and Medium. The Las Vegas renewal calms the fears of some fans that by assigning the show to the Friday night "death slot" in the second hour the network was hanging it out to die. No word as to what the network will do with Crossing Jordan and Law & Order: Criminal Intent, which will both lose their timeslots to Sunday Night Football but I at least wouldn't be at all surprised if they stay on Sunday night and run straight through with new episodes after the football season ends. Of course with the renewal of the main Law & Order series came the announcement that the incumbent ADA under Jack McCoy, Alexandra Borgia (played by Anne Parisse) will be leaving the show. Since Jill Hennessy left the series there have been four ADAs, played by Carrie Lowell, Angie Harmon, Elizabeth Rohm and now Parisse. Her tenure in the role is the shortest yet, just a season and a half.

I you can't do fiction, play games: After this season's rather weak dramatic efforts and the sliding ratings for The Apprentice NBC seemed to hit gold with Deal Or No Deal, so what could be more natural than another game show. The network has given the greenlight to a show called 1 Versus 100 to be produced by Endemol Productions. The premise is simple - one player competes against a "mob" of 100 other people in a trivia competition. The more people the one player beats the more money to be won. A player can stop at any time and take the money but if the player outlasts all 100 of the "mob" they can win a multi-million dollar prize. Of course if the player gets an answer wrong the prize is nothing. The show, which has elements that are reminiscent of Who Wants To Be A Millionaire? is popular in a number of European countries and at least has the virtue of being more of a challenge than Deal Or No Deal which is also produced by Endemol.

A House is a Holmes: I've mentioned the various ways in which Dr. Gregory House is like Sherlock Holmes in the past, but one escaped me until the past couple of episodes - music. Holmes was an accomplished violinist who owned a Stradivarius and reportedly played professionally following his "death" at Reichenbach Falls. House is an accomplished piano player. Of course it helps that his residence - apartment B at 221 Baker Street (?) - is on the ground floor. So much easier to put a piano in there than in Holmes's second floor walk-up rooms. (Or maybe it's just because Hugh Laurie is a very good piano player.)

Deal Or No Deal - The Online Game

Last night I took a rip at Deal or No Deal as being a boring idea for a game show. I still think I'm right, but Mark Evanier doesn't agree. He likes it, in fact he likes it so much that he wrote not one but two posts about it. I still think I'm right, but it's a case of horses for courses and for him it's an enjoyable way to waste an hour.

However since I wasn't interested in the show enough to check out its website (and I rarely am by the way) it took a mention from Mark to get me to find out about the Deal Or No Deal online game, which is a rather interesting way to spend a few minutes. You can't win anything - that's left to their phone in thing that runs during each episode and seems about as interesting as watching paint dry - but you can take part in the sort of decision making that the players have to go through. As I expected there is no real optimal strategy for picking cases - picking 1-2-3-4-5 seems to work as well as randomization. The big question is when is the right time to make your deal. Unless you've had a truly atrocious run of luck you shouldn't make a deal before you get to the level of picking one case at a time. At the same time, unless the choice is between two extremely high amounts of money you should make a deal at some point in play - in other words don't open all of the suitcases. Beyond that, your strategy depends on perceived odds of winning. Try it yourself.

The Game Show For Dummies

According to the introductory narration for the NBC weak long "event" Deal Or No Deal, the show is a "hit" in over 35 countries. It seems obvious to me that these are countries that have yet to discover the thrills ofJeopardy or Wheel Of Fortune. In fact they probably haven't seen Family Feud yet. Frankly I found this show to be boring with a capital bore.

Deal Or No Deal seems to be a cross between Hide And Seek and "pick a number between 1 and 10". There are 26 numbered briefcases (the fancy metal kind) held by a racially diverse group of attractive young women. Each briefcase holds a sum of money ranging between 1 cent and $1,000,000. Well not really - it holds a card that states an amount between 1 cent and $1,000,000 which I think is missing a bet but more on that later. The player picks one briefcase as his or her own. Then the game begins. The player tells host Howie Mandel the numbers of six of the remaining briefcases which are then opened to reveal an amount of money. That amount of money is then removed from the possible amounts that could be in the briefcase. After six cases are opened the "Banker" calls down to Mandel with an offer. This is the amount of money the bank will pay the player based on the possible amounts of money that could be in the briefcase. If that offer is rejected the player names five numbers before a new offer is made, and so on with the number of briefcases picked being reduced by one each time until the player is left to pick one case at a time. The greater the number of high denomination cases remaining the greater the offer made by the bank. Just as an example if three cases remain with values of $10,000, $300,000 and $400,000 (as happened in tonight's episode) the Bank might offer $189,000. If you were to substitute $100,000 for $10,000 the Bank's offer would be higher while if the $300,000 amount were $30,000 instead, the offer would be substantially lower.

There is a certain, minimal amount of strategy involved. Obviously there's no way in which the selection of briefcases can be anything but random, therefore strategy really emerges when it comes to choosing at time to give up hoping for the "two in the bush" and take the "bird in the hand" - that is to say when to stop picking briefcases and take the banker's offer. It's an odds question worthy of a poker player. In the situation I mentioned above, the odds were two to one against that the player had the $10,000 card in his briefcase but those odds were grater than they had been before the last pick which had eliminated a $400,000 case (but the offer was better as well). He took the offer and was right - his case had the $10,000 card but even if he hadn't taken the offer the next bank offer, when it would be even money that what was in his case would be $10,000 his offer would have been lower, but still significantly higher than the minimum amount he could have made. Just from casual observation it would seem that the optimal strategy if you have a large number of high value cards remaining and a small number of low value cards left is to continue playing, while the correct strategy with significantly more low than high value cards - say eight cases under $100,000 and two cases above it - would be to take what you can get rather than risk losing your high value cases thereby lowering your offer from the Banker.

The problem is that I don't think that any of the contestants who are playing this thing has any idea of an optimal strategy. Of the two contestants I saw on Tuesday night, one was a carpenter who didn't like to say the "F" word - which in this case was fiancee, referring to his girlfriend - and invited his bartender to be one of his supporters on the show on the grounds that getting him some TV time would mean free drinks. And he was the smart one! The other contestant was supposedly a teacher who seemed all giggly and called one of the models her friend who she didn't even know but shared her name. Lord give me the strength to not watch this again.

The show is hosted by Howie Mandel. Now I liked Howie Mandel when he was on St. Elsewhere. Despite being a comedian (allegedly) he seemed like might actually have some ability as a dramatic actor. I won't say he was one of the best things about St. Elsewhere but he was far from the worst. Unfortunately he never followed up on acting and devoted his life to such things as sticking a rubber glove over is head until he blew out his sinuses. If you're in Canada what you've mostly seen Howie in of late is a bunch of commercials for Boston Pizza (a chain of restaurants which as far as I can ell has nothing to do with Boston). If you've seen those commercials you'll be happy to know that Howie has taken a couple of downers and is vaguely behaving like a calm human being he's about a 1 on a scale where 0 is normal and negative numbers denote needing pep pills. But please don't get me started on the soul patch beard. A man of his age - which is to say about 9 months older than I am - shouldn't look like that.

The truth is though that any problems I have with Howie Mandel are minor compared with the problems that this show has forced upon itself. At the top of this article I mentioned that Deal Or No Deal is supposed to be a hit in 35 over countries none of which have discovered the thrills of Jeopardy. The producers are proud of the lack of intellectual stimulation in this show. At the start of each episode they state that there are "no crazy stunts, no trivia questions." The problem is that I like a show in which the contestants are challenged to do more than think of a number between 1 and 26. Whether that's eating gross food - as in Fear Factor (and believe me I never thought I say that Fear Factor was significantly better than another show) - or answering a trivia question, I want something more. I want my winners to work for their prize, to achieve it, and - not to put too fine a point on it - earn their prizes. That's one reason why I like The Amazing Race. Those people have to accomplish a great deal in order to win a million dollars while the people on Deal Or No Deal don't. And frankly, when you're used to something better, a game show for dummies just isn't enough. Avoid this like the plague.