We picked up some details on this a few months ago but it looks like a press release has dropped for Society Game, a new show from South Korea that looks like it shares DNA with Bother’s Bar favourite The Genius (series three discussion linked, others on the Specials Board) – from what we gather same director, same production company (CJ E & M, although interestingly a co-prod with Endemol) and it sounds like Bandage Man might be involved.
But if you’re looking for a show built around clever games my gut feeling suggests you may be a bit disappointed. It looks like contestants are split into two camps, one camp has a leader who will be authoritarian, the other will be democratic. Camps are given physical and mental challenges and it sounds like someone from the losing camp will get kicked off.
So it’s not The Genius, although there’s no reason it won’t be entertaining in more [extreme] ways. the set-up sounds quite interesting at least and will finally answer the age old question as to whether a dictatorship or democracy is OFFICIALLY better I’m sure.
They seem to have gone all-out on the set:
As usual we heartily recommend following Bumdidlyumptious’ Twitter for latest news (and their page). Whether we cover the show with its own page will depend on if it’s going to be subtitled and if it looks like it might be any good or not. The first episode is on October 16th, so allowing some time to sub we only have about a month to wait.
I’m afraid we have no news regarding The Genius Game UK, although we were all aware that it would be a hard sell. Still, TV is a glacial process at the best of times so you never know.
Putting two and two together to get π, if the set is sufficiently mega, d’you suppose that Endemol might have half a thought of bringing the world there to film their own versions if the format proves a hit?
Looking through the contestant bios from Bumdi, while it’s still not ideal, that looks like a [i]much[/i] better gender balance than The Genius.
And they’re all beautiful… and intelligent!
A lot of “sexy brains” on both genders.
@NoelEdmonds The long wait is over! The new run of Deal is returning to Ch4 on Oct 10th at 15:00.
Then where’s Countdown? That usually airs at 3:10pm.
Right, I’ve had an email back from Channel 4. Countdown moves to 2:10pm from October 10th onwards.
This won’t be permanent… will it?
I am as hopeful as you that it isn’t. I’m hoping it’s just a case of seeing the show out with a bang and then letting Countdown back into its usual slot.
I want to know when On Tour is happening.
I would assume after the current televised run.
I forgot to mention Das Pro7 Auswärtsspiel started today. Since I didn’t notice much promotion (apart from several interviews and very few tv ads) I forgot this and will have a look into it tomorrow.
Basic premise is that Elton and Palina Rojinski (that girl from Joko and Klaas) will have an enormous saturday night entertainment show at one family’s home. But that family doesn’t know. They just know they are one of 10 families that could have several TV trucks arrive at 20:15 and get the chance to play for 100,000€. There are musical acts and several games (in one interview head of Prosieben light entertainment (iirc) talked about being able to prepare game 8 whilst other games are played because they took all the measurements of the houses and surrounding areas), but I have no idea about a scoring system. The show has just ended, so I haven’t read a critique yet. As per usual you should be able to watch it online at Prosieben with dark arts for at least one week, maybe it could be on myspass afterwards, but I wouldn’t count on that.
Just read the first critique: It seems to be enjoyable chaos. And for the scoring system: there is just one contestant playing for darts against celebrities in Schlag den Star/Teamwork like games to have more chances in popping a big balloon at the end. That will give him the 100,000€.
And 300 people were working on this show (probably not all of them were live at the event, but the critique on Quotenmeter.de suggests most of them did, including important Prosieben management folks).
I just watched it.
There was a team of three celebrities (Guido Cantz, Thore Schölermann and Lily Becker) who competed in 3 games each against the contestant.
The nine games didn’t include any basic quiz games like SdR does, but more skill games. For example they had to drive with a certain speed through a speed radar on bicycles, had to climb in 20m height and throw numbered balls down in sequence. Most games were impressive for the “surprise” factor of the show, but the smaller ones were more interesting imho. The musical acts are playing on a track next to the soccer field where they played the big games so that the entire village had fun.
But there is the problem. Instead of really going there on that day, they had trucks without any ads on them placed in the village for several days. So it wasn’t exactly surprising for the family to compete in the show.
The end game was throwing a dart onto a golden balloon from 7m distance (because they are called pro7) and the contestant had quite a lot of darts since the celebs were terribly bad.
In every game one prize (big TV, travel voucher, car, …) could be won and every time a celebrity won it, the viewers at home could call in to win it.
I generally liked the show and think they should do 4 shows a year, monthly from June to September, so they get used to working like that without it losing its event-y feeling.
But (as twitter pointed out) there were many problems:
The family seemed pretty rich with its giant house, so no one felt with the contestant. Elton has made clear since then that they live in a “Mustehaus” (a house that belongs to a house building company and can be visited to see how your house could look like), so they didn’t have to pay that much for this house. And they still pay the mortgage, so they are actually not utterly rich, but normal.
The hosts were impressively bad with saying the rules. They often forgot to mention something or didn’t name the goal of the game. Frank Buschmann helped out a little then, but he seemed pretty annoyed by the chaos and to me seemed very unfriendly. I would try Ron Ringuth next time.
After two thirds of the show, two of the most succesful German youtubers came into the house and played with the oldest son for 1000€ Rock, Paper, Scissors. No one knew who they were (except for the children in the family) and twitter didn’t like them at all.
The celebrities didn’t seem to be giving everything to win, which made it all a bit pointless really.
What twitter apparently didn’t need was the split screen in commercial breaks. You would always see what they did live in a small window next to the ads, but it didn’t add anything to the show.
And the end game seemed really boring.
I think they should try to show the build up of the games a bit more and do more around the house (Elton was funny enough to look into the fridge and let the rest of yesterday’s dinner be heated up by the contestant’s wife to eat in a break). A friend of mine suggested they should let the musical acts perform acoustic versions of their songs in the kitchen/bed room/ somewhere in the house which I would have liked a lot!
I’m looking forward to a second episode, but the ratings were not spectacular, Supertalent was tough competition though.
Thanks, there were adverts for this during Schlag den Star last week but we weren’t really paying attention. Will try to look into!
Looks interesting and even if its only half as good as the genius could still be fun/good show to watch
The main rules and a couple of clips are up in the usual place. It looks like The Genius’ cerebral Main Matches are swapped out for a wider range of mental and physical games – hopefully there will still be chance for the interesting social game to come through.