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TREASURE HUNTERS: THE LOSERS
GAMES ACROSS THE OCEAN with TOM HOURIGAN
Margie Fogal made a stab at qualifying for Survivor and The Amazing Race. For whatever reason, she never received the call.Perhaps that was all for the best. Fogal says she does not care for backstabbing adventure games. Hence, her family's selection for NBC's Treasure Hunters was a perfect fit.
Monday night, the road ended for the Fogals. They were eliminated as the game traveled across the ocean to St. Bartholomew's Church in London.
As the family's mother, Fogal was philosophical about the defeat. In this week's Treasure Hunters: The Losers interview, she said the experience was arguably the greatest her family has ever encountered.
When you hear this edition of Treasure Hunters: The Losers, you may find the voice familiar.Keith Brown, part of the Brown Family team which lost last week on the NBC adventure game, was told by an interviewer he and his brothers just wanted to have two interviews with the media. Three weeks earlier, they were eliminated from the game, only to be reinserted after a contest-ending injury to one of the other teams.
Brown, 43, lives in Corvallis, Or., but hails from Midland, Tx. He's an operations manager for a high-tech industry but has always had the spirit of adventure in his blood.
He and his brothers are even collaborating on a comic book called "Jurassic Knights," which features a combination of adventure and irreverence.
In this week's Treasure Hunters: the Losers interview, Brown discusses what went wrong as his team approached Fort Pulaski near the coast of Georgia. He also re-issues a challenge to America. When you hear it, you may think you are listening to a pro wrestling interview.
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This columnist has held big-budget, primetime quiz extravaganzas in high regard, due potentially to the thrilling, exhilarating and tense moments they can produce: as such, it was pleasing to see ITV commissioning a format entitled Poker Face, devised by the UK’s arguably most popular television presenting duo Ant McPartlin and Declan Donnelly, with, unusually, a guaranteed one million pound top prize. With renewed interest amongst US networks for formats of this nature, it is possible that, should Poker Face prove successful in the UK, the game could make its way across the Atlantic – so let us attempt to justify, or otherwise, its stay of execution.The format is actually very simple indeed – in a move akin to the strip scheduling of Millionaire in its infancy, ITV is running Poker Face on seven consecutive nights, culminating in the big money final on the seventh show. Six contestants take part in each episode, and play five rounds of general knowledge multiple-choice questions (answering six questions in the first round, and five questions in each round thereafter). Each question has a monetary value – starting at 500 pounds per question and culminating with 1500 pounds on offer per question in the final round – with answers provided via keypads; meaning each contestant is unaware of the progress of his/her opponents.
The contestant with the smallest personal money pot faces automatic elimination – however, all players at the end of each round must take part in the Face Off – a ten-second opportunity to ‘fold’, continuing some rather tenuous card game terminology, and to leave with the winnings they have at that point, should a specific player believe they face elimination anyway and are likely to lose everything. The rounds are interspersed with humorous, light-hearted insults as contestants attempt to either undermine the confidence of their opponents or assert their own by creating the impression they’ve answered more questions correctly than they actually have. The process is repeated until the end of the game – the winner (be that the contestant at the top of the leaderboard or, in that situation, their opponent should the former ‘fold’) takes home fifty thousand pounds and the right to play in the million pound final. For a sixty-minute show, the level of complexity of the show’s main mechanic is surprising facile.
A firm believer in first impressions (this column was written after the show’s first night), let us indulge in a straight pro/con comparison. First, the positives: full marks must go to those who worked on the set of Poker Face – whilst lacking any one particular truly innovative quirk, it is beautifully executed: semicircular in design, the contestants backed by a truly enormous audience, themselves fronting a series of shimmering light patterns at the back of the studio.
Another nice touch are the bail-out buttons used in the Face Off, which rise from the floor a few feet in front of the contestants’ podia; and an enormous screen behind the hosts which divides in half to allow eliminated players to leave the game also is highly suitable here. Serial game show composer Paul Farrer provides the music score, a gentleman often criticised for highly derivative soundtracks with little to choose between many of his works. Here, the music is adequate: a very catchy, heavy four-note beat ends important sequences, and whilst the rest of the score is not striking, it sets the right tone. Ant and Dec maintain their reputation for a high level of competent presentation: and whilst this is their first gameshow, per se, since hosting Friends Like These for the BBC in 2000, their question reading is impeccable and the humour they bring to proceedings is pitched probably at just the right level. There are, however, a number of criticisms to be levelled at the game itself, however. A format of this nature, which relies on the secrecy of numbers of correct answers being given as its mechanic to enable uncertainty and unnecessary ‘folding’, will always struggle to maintain the balance between keeping audiences engaged by providing them with timely information about contestants’ progress and giving too much away. Certainly, Poker Face falls into this latter category – viewers are immediately shown the leaderboard as soon as rounds have been completed, so the audience is aware who will be eliminated, making the actual process of elimination entirely predictable and laborious, particularly in the early rounds where the stakes are low enough to almost guarantee the absence of any ‘folding’. This makes for a somewhat unusual show: unlike most games where the basic round format does not deviate one iota from first to last, the earlier rounds suffer; a certain amount of tension is generated in the later stages of the game, simply by virtue of higher stakes; tension absent in the game’s early rounds.
In such a way, it would have been perhaps a good idea to play up the importance of character perception: asking contestants to nominate the lowest scoring player in a particular round, with that player earning a reprieve if he/she went unnamed – or far more simply, delaying the reveal in early rounds until the contestants themselves discovered whether or not they were the lowest scorer. It is also fair to argue that a show where deception and underhand play are integral to the format would benefit from ‘unknown faces’, as it were: this columnist recognised one contestant of the six in the first show from her appearance on Weakest Link, with a second having enjoyed a gameshow history. The show would also benefit from a revised pacing: fifty minutes would suffice; sixty seems unnecessary lengthy; and, on a more trivial note, this columnist was particular keen on the project’s previous moniker The Con.Test prior to ITV securing sponsorship for the series by a major online poker organisation, but this is a minor gripe.
Given ITV’s admittedly weak record in producing solid primetime gameshows, Poker Face is somewhat admirable: it has an undeniable flow, aesthetically you’ll find few shows better, and there is some genuine tension towards the end of the game - despite the fact the audience is already aware of the result, there is a wry enjoyment in witnessing a player ‘folding’ when there was no need to do so, instantly eliminating their place in the game. This is not a perfect job by any means, but it’s an attention retainer that seemingly would provide ITV with a strong option for an occasional series. For now, we await what one can expect to be an explosive final few minutes at the end of the run when the million pound winner is decided: and how many gameshows can almost guarantee an event like that?
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