Waste Motion

Celebrity Family Feud was on NBC earlier this week. Didn't catch it, but it made me think about certain ritualistic parts of game shows which could, and should, be dropped.

For instance, Feud starts with a face-off before each round. If you win, your team decides if it wants to guess the rest of the board, or let the other side guess. If you don't guess all the answers on the board, the other side is allowed one guess where it can steal your points. In all my years watching, I can't recall a single time any team turn down "offense" to play "defense." (Unlike coin flips at football games, where occasionally winners opt to kick rather than receive.) Think about it--if you're so good you can guess what's left on the board, then you're good enough to guess in the first place. And playing first puts you in control and guarantees you a shot at the points you might not get otherwise. Why do they even bother to ask?

Then there's the greatest game show of all, Jeopardy! Its central quirk--that they give you the answers and you guess the questions--has always been a formality. We all know they're asking you questions. Unfortunately, this formality can get pretty serious in later rounds where if you forget to phrase your response as a question, you get it wrong. (I once tried out for a game show and mistakenly started an answer with "what is..." The lady in charge hit me and said this always happens.)

Lately, we've got Deal Or No Deal. There's essentially no strategy involved, just guts and luck. You start with 26 cases, each holding a figure from one penny to a million dollars. You pick a case and then start opening the rest. First round you open six, then five, then four and so on until the final rounds where you only open one. After each round, the banker offers you money based on how much is left, and you get to decide deal or no deal. Except no matter how well or how poorly you doing, no one ever accepts the deal early in the game--they're always ready to play on. I've never seen anyone accept the banker's deal after the first two rounds, or even the first three, after more than half the cases have been revealed. In fact, so sure are the producers that you'll not take the deal, that they wait until the second round is over to introduce your friends, who will root you on for the rest of the game. I suppose they have to offer you the deal, but everyone knows no one will take it.

What they could do is a Who Wants To Be A Millionaire sort of solution. On that show (I'm referring to the prime time version--I assume the syndicated Millionaire is the same), they have a strict rule that your answer is never final until you've literally responded in the affirmative to "Is that your final answer?" I assume they do this because their lawyers warned them if they didn't, guests might say they were still thinking and hadn't answered definitively. But because this would be tiresome to see in each round, especially the early, easy ones, they do ask the question, but they edit it out from broadcasts. In fact, there have been cases where host Regis Philbin forgot to ask, and they brought the contestant back.