Somehow, and I expect completely accidentally, Friday October 30th is going to be an absolute monster day for formats.

• It’s the final of Last One Laughing Halloween on Prime (it starts the week previous on the 23rd).
• It’s the live on Netflix Beat Luke Littler event.
• It’s the Celebrity Traitors final.

LOL will ultimately be fine, it’ll have a long tail and that’s just as well as Celebrity Traitors will be taking up a lot of the air I presume.

Beat Luke Littler is going to be absolutely fascinating. Broadcast on any other day you’d expect it to get a sampling. Unfortunately in setting the date well in advance it can’t have known Celebrity Traitors would shift from Wednesday/Thursday to Thursday/Friday, so now it finds itself up against the TV event of the year. How is Richard Osman going to cope with being the richardosman on Beat Luke Littler AND recording a timely reaction episode of The Rest is Entertainment? I can’t wait to find out. Anyway you can buy tickets, the auditorium could be anything from extremely busy to extremely empty and there’s no real way of knowing. We will have a Show Discussion post up for it on the day, although I’d expect more chat in catch-up!

A story doing the rounds in the broadcasting press yesterday – the BBC will be starting a “quiz and trivia” Youtube channel – think basically the sort of thing on BBC2 daytime, but will apparently be dipping more into the archives. So far, so low thousands. But more interestingly is that it will have original content, and the first new format proposed by Strong Watch Studios is a show called The Quiz Vault with Youtuber Max Fosh, where celebrity guests take part in quizzes based on a variety of old and new formats changing every round with some chat in between. The Quiz Vault launches next year.

Max Fosh is becoming a bit of a BBC darling – he’s about to host more episodes of maths-based quiz for Radio 4 Your Number’s Up recording in a pub near King’s Cross in about a fortnight – you can get audience tickets from SRO.

No not Bother’s Bar HA HA HA, the new series of Korean brain-survival show The Devil’s Plan, subtitled Dead Again, comes to Netflix on November 10th. Although they may as well have called it The Devil’s Plan: Look, We Know You Mainly Want Stars From The Genius So Here You Are (and some Bloody Game as well). I do love that over a decade on, stars are still talking about their time on The Genius when they turn up with other things. Hopefully they’ve sorted their prison system out this time around.

This came up on the Discord – do you remember the 2013 US show Whodunnit? where a secret “murderer” in the group goes round killing off other players in elaborate and gruesome ways and the other players have to figure out how they did it in order to stay alive? It was a show not without its faults (one of the big ones being you’re meant to work out who the murderer who was not committing any actual murders was) but the set-ups were quite fun. Well now it’s back in fan-made form, and they’ve even got Gildart Jackson to come back as legally distinct butler Gilbert. Different to the original is that the killer amongst them can tamper with the evidence which sounds like the sort of change that could make a meaningful difference. This, from Dice Reality (who has previous form with a fanmade version of Survivor), has a certain “somebody went back to 1996 and made a reality show” charm – not quite enough cameras, no microphones, background music that’s slightly too high, but it also has ambition and a clear love for the original. Presumably episodes coming out weekly.

This came up on my Youtube feed last night completely unexpectedly – I’ve no idea who’s behind it (well I do – the names are in the credits) and chat on the Discord sounds like it’s a passion project, but I wouldn’t be doing my “job” properly if I didn’t give it a push. It’s a horror trivia game show – format is a pretty simple categories-and-buzzers affair although the endgame goes surprisingly Finders Keepers, but it’s also really slick and well produced and hosted, tapping into campy 60s comedy horror odd couple witch and zombie set-up. Special guests from the horror movie world ask questions. Doesn’t outstay its welcome. A nice surprise! Episodes released weekly.

Here’s something likely to be of interest to my sorts of readers, I think, a new Korean reality show that started a few weeks ago on KOCOWA+ just as I let my sub run out after Bloody Game finished, but that I might resub and binge when the whole thing has gone out – I’ve seen the first two episodes and I don’t want to overuse the word ‘interesting’, but it’s really interesting (unfortunately it’s also come out at time where there’s loads of other things competing for my time). It is also, I suspect, quite complex for an average Western viewer – there are lots of different moving parts, the first two episodes are around 1h 40m, the third one seems to be 3h.

The first series of The Community worked slightly differently, the group of politically diverse people have to make decisions for the common good but if you can state another contestant’s persuasions correctly you can eliminate them, and this new version whilst being a different game seems to have become popular enough that KOCOWA has bought and translated the first series off the back of it, I understand. This one certainly begins as a economics 101 lesson which aims to test Adam Smith’s Invisible Hand theory, will you get as balanced society that succeeds if everyone works in their own self interest? I’ll hide the rules from the first two episodes behind a cut. Because there’s a lot.