Deal Oder No Deal
Navigating Blogger in Greece is interesting, especially when you don't know Greek.Just spent 4 days in Germany and got to see a few good games on TV while I was out there. Germany's version of Deal or no Deal is fun and, interestingly, is called Deal or no Deal. The host even asks that as the question to the contestant. Very strange. 250K Euros is the top prize. The episode I saw last Saturday featured a woman who was trying to pull off her best Brooks impression...went 4 rounds in a row with no safety net. But unlike Brooks she came out a winner, taking home 65,000 Euros, which with the current exchange rate is roughly $8.9 Billion in US dollars.
The set and logo are very similar to the US version, same fonts and everything. Only strange thing I could find was that there was a huge lighting event at the start of each round, simliar to what Millionaire does before each question. Kind of annyoing. Despite only featuring one contestant per hour show, the show managed to be paced better than our version. The friends and family were consulted very infrequently, and there were no annoying fake-outs of case openings that were actually commercial breaks. Of course, there are only two commercial breaks for the whole hour (each one is honestly 7 minutes long).
The next day, randomly flipping through the dial, I caught the German version of the Rich List, interestingly titled...The Rich List. Trust me, I studied German for four years--they do have words for those words in German. The Rich List was fun to watch, mainly since I'd only ever seen that one infamous US episode from last year. The show moved along at a nice clip with one interesting question (name the internet extensions [i.e., .gr, .uk, etc.] for the European countries) and one lame question (name the top 30 countries in order of land mass size). The team conked out in the bonus round pretty high up the ladder, so it made for an interesting episode.That show really was Hot Potato on steroids. It's good for a 30-minute GSN-style show but as a big money primetime quiz I'm not sure what they were thinking. It just isn't novel enough to expect people to turn away from something more creative.
On to the Neterhlands this weekend which should provide some interesting viewing opportunities.
The set and logo are very similar to the US version, same fonts and everything. Only strange thing I could find was that there was a huge lighting event at the start of each round, simliar to what Millionaire does before each question. Kind of annyoing. Despite only featuring one contestant per hour show, the show managed to be paced better than our version. The friends and family were consulted very infrequently, and there were no annoying fake-outs of case openings that were actually commercial breaks. Of course, there are only two commercial breaks for the whole hour (each one is honestly 7 minutes long).
The next day, randomly flipping through the dial, I caught the German version of the Rich List, interestingly titled...The Rich List. Trust me, I studied German for four years--they do have words for those words in German. The Rich List was fun to watch, mainly since I'd only ever seen that one infamous US episode from last year. The show moved along at a nice clip with one interesting question (name the internet extensions [i.e., .gr, .uk, etc.] for the European countries) and one lame question (name the top 30 countries in order of land mass size). The team conked out in the bonus round pretty high up the ladder, so it made for an interesting episode.That show really was Hot Potato on steroids. It's good for a 30-minute GSN-style show but as a big money primetime quiz I'm not sure what they were thinking. It just isn't novel enough to expect people to turn away from something more creative.
On to the Neterhlands this weekend which should provide some interesting viewing opportunities.
posted by Brad @ 4:23 AM 2 comment(s)