OK, this is rather more curious than anticipated. The Runner is an exclusive webseries for Verizon’s Go 90 mobile video service, and if you want to watch you’re going to need to use a VPN to pretend you’re in the US. It’s based on an idea of Matt Damon and Ben Affleck that has been knocking around for about 15 years.
In essence it’s a manhunt show (see Wanted, Hunted) but really it’s not a manhunt show, it’s really more like an asymmetric version of The Amazing Race. Each day is effectively a different stage with both runner and the five Chaser teams having to solve a series of problems. The Runner’s tasks tend to be rather simpler – indeed they’re effectively following sets of instructions around a course ending with an escape vehicle. The Chasers’ puzzles are rather more involved and require help from people watching and playing along on social media. They are certainly not gimmes. The morning puzzle tells the team which city the The Runner is running to, and once teams get within a certain distance they’re given a second puzzle revealing the location of The Runner’s task which again the viewers can help with for cash rewards. Chasers are playing for money, the bounty starts at $15k and increases $15k every day, and if The Runner gets caught they’re replaced.
Viewers are also playing for money – people who solve the clues are put into a daily sweepstake to win cash prizes, and the Chaser teams (and now The Runner) also have money to give away to their social media followers and helpers.
The live shows are fronted by actor and Youtube sensation Matthew Patrick (aka Mat Pat) who is quite sharp and funny and indeed a highlight is his rather loose chats with the social media crew. My issue that it sounds like the show was conceived to be three five-minute highlight shows throughout the day, by Day Four we’re already up two lots of twenty minutes and a ten minute show. This could be fine if it was filled with substance, but of that fifty minutes only about 20 of them were filled with reality footage, for something that was intended to be bitesized there’s a lot of filler. The morning episode usually has the story of the day before turned into a ten minute edit and setting the teams off on their first task of the day, the second daily episode is about twenty minutes of Twitter reaction and occasionally some recorded messages from the teams in the field, the third one reveals prize winners and some of the early footage. Every episode features the words “social media” upwards of fifty times.
If you were to attempt to binge watch you’d get quite irritated. It probably really is better watching it as it as designed to be watched. As it is you’re not really getting enough compelling narrative across the fifty minutes to feel worthwhile.
But. But but but. When it’s exciting it’s really exciting, and I’d suggest that the story of Day three (seen on Day 4 Ep 1) is right up there with the best of this sort of thing on broadcast television – real heart-in-mouth stuff. Certainly worth dipping into to see how the experiment works out if you are able. As it is the official Twitter has just over 10,000 followers a week in, I don’t know how many they were expecting or wanting although I’d suggest with $1m in prizes to give out I suspect probably a bit more.
Saturday 16th July, 10:30pm – midnight(ish) UK
