Million Dollar Password — An early look
Here’s the thing about game show revivals: you have to satisfy people on two levels. For fans of the old show, you have to make the gameplay of the new show familiar enough to keep them happy and coming back. And, in order to attract new fans, you have to modernize and add touches that will suck in viewers and help build drama. That’s one of the reasons why most new game shows have Who Wants to Be a Millionaire-style darkened sets with swirling lights, and depend on ominous music and tight camera angles to create drama.
Million Dollar Password, premiering Sunday at 8 PM ET, has all of that. They even nabbed Millionaire’s original American host, Regis Philbin, to give it that extra bit of primetime oomph. But does it work? Well… sorta. Fans of the Allen Ludden / Tom Kennedy / Bert Convy incarnations might be dissatisfied with what they’ve done to their old favorite, but even an objective observer can see that the gameplay has some flaws that are going to need to be worked out for the show to succeed.
The idea behind Password has always been simple: one member of a celebrity / contestant pair tries to guess one-word answers based on the one-word clues given by their partners. In the old versions, the game would bounce back and forth between the pairs until the word was guessed or the number of guesses ran out. In this version, however, the game is played more like Pyramid: each pair has a series of five Passwords to guess in 30 seconds in an attempt to get as many points as possible. The pair with the most points after four rounds goes to the bonus round. That was a disappointing change on the producers’ part; I know they want to build tension, but there was nothing wrong with the old method, where contestants and celebs can steal words based on the clues their opponents gave. Maybe they just thought it was too slow and “think-y” for them.
And, like most game shows these days, that’s where the fun really begins. It’s a graduated system, with each round being worth increasing amounts of money. Here, the range is from $10,000 to $1 million (there’s a weird jump from $250k to the million, but that’s a small quibble). The object is for the contestant and his or her partner to guess five passwords in a minute and a half. They only get three clues per word. As each round progresses, the words get harder and there are less chances for the contestant to pass or get something wrong. And, of course, the contestant has the chance to stop after each round and keep the money they’ve won or press onward, risking it all.
Well, not all. One of the glaring weaknesses of the bonus round is that if the contestant passes the second round of clues, he or she can’t go home with anything less than the $25,000 won there. Not that “safety levels” can’t work; Millionaire has two of them. But to have one so early, after a relatively easy round, really kills the bonus round’s tension. So, all of a sudden we have a “nothing to lose” set of clues after two relatively easy bonus rounds. If it were me, I’d make the $100,000 level the safety level and give the contestant some real decisions to make as the rounds progress.
But, then again, one of the reasons they may do it that way is because the contest doesn’t depend on one person. If the celebrity you’re paired with screws up somehow, you might go home with nothing (there are no returning contestants here… two complete games were played in the episode sent for preview). In the opening episode, the celebs are Neil Patrick Harris and Rachael Ray. Harris, who it seems grew up watching game shows, is an excellent player, giving good clues and pulling words out of his hat when he’s on the receiving end. Ray? Well, let’s just say that for a Password panelist, she’s a good cook.
Other celebs scheduled to appear are Rosie O’Donnell, Tony Hawk, and Susie Essman, among others. And, of course, Betty White — who has been doing Password for so long that she met her future husband, Ludden, on the show in the early sixties — will be there. Whichever contestants get White should consider themselves lucky, since she’s probably the best Password player alive right now.
So, what about the rest of the show? Well, Regis is Regis: he busts on the contestants during the interviews and kisses up to the celebrities. This show is perfect for him. The lights and music and closeups give the show a more immediate feel than the old versions ever had, but that’s par for the course in primetime. And, as you’d expect, the first episode contains a lot of choppy edits and fill-in voiceovers as Regis and the producers get a feel for explaining the game while keeping the flow going. That’ll all get smoothed out over time.
Million Dollar Password needs to be tweaked, no doubt about it. And I wish the format of the play-in game was more akin to the old version than what they have now. But the show has the potential to grow on me. And considering I’ve been a Password fan for almost thirty years, that’s saying a lot.
South Park: Britney’s New Look
(S12E02) The thing that makes South Park stand out above all other television shows is the creators’ ability to take an old idea and put a new spin on it with depth and good reasoning. This episode is a perfect example of that.
Britney Spears tries to escape her fame by hiding out in Colorado. Sadly, the paparazzi follow her and through a confluence of events, she blows her own head off with a shotgun. Fortunately, this is South Park and such things aren’t fatal here.
There were a tremendous number of horror movie references in this episode. I caught Children of the Corn, The Omen and Invasion of the Body Snatchers. I remember them doing similar ominous music during the first season episode “Damian” which was a more direct parody of “The Omen”. I’m certain I missed a few references. If you caught any others, please mention them in the comments as I (along with all the other readers) would be interested in knowing them.
Of course the first observation that Trey Parker and Matt Stone make in their satire is how Britney Spears news seems to overwhelm important news such as the Presidential debates. I did love Hillary’s line when they returned to the debates after going to Britney Watch: “And spearchuckers.”
It seemed out of character when Cartman ran out of the room after Britney put the shotgun in her mouth and pulled the trigger. I would have thought he would have tried to snap some pictures so he could collect $100,000 or more from the media (”That’s enough to buy slaves”).
South Park has always had its shock moments and Britney’s suicide was definitely one of them. And then she was STILL ALIVE (albeit as a body without most of its head). It’s a testament to the creators that they can make that funny.
The episode exemplified the tendency of the media (and, by extension, the American public) to tear down celebrities in an attempt to make ourselves feel better, such as labeling Britney’s suicide attempt as a “crazy no-top-of-the-head look”. And then, to make matters worse, they point out deficiencies in her body, her mind, her voice and her camel toe (”a slap in the face to camels everywhere”).
I did catch a pastiche of “Frosty the Snowman” for the narration during Stan and Britney’s train ride to the North Pole. I found this unusual in an episode that had so many horror references and it seemed to detract slightly.
The core of this episode is how we treat celebrities. I love how they compare it to the human sacrifices of ages past. Those sacrifices were also done to make individuals feel better about their lives (by appeasing whatever deities they worshipped). We raise up and tear down media icons nowadays for much the same reasons.
Going back to my opening statement in this review, South Park has always stood above other programs by its willingness to pursue meaningful satire rather than immediate laugh-out-loud humor (although this episode had both). This was exemplified at the end of the episode where Britney’s death led to a good harvest (they killed Britney for a good corn crop?) and the mention at the end that Miley Cyrus will be the next teen icon and therefore the next sacrifice. If Matt and Trey are right, we’ll be reading about Miley’s self-destruction in about ten years.
It wasn’t their best episode, but it was far from their worst. On a scale of “poor” to “excellent,” I’d rate it as a “very good”.