In the red corner! Worldwide not-sensation Destination X starting next Wednesday (30th) and Thursday at 9pm and going out every Wednesday and Thursday thereafter. Claimed by lazy writers to be a cross between Race Across the World (i.e. they’re on a bus) and The Traitors (i.e. people get eliminated?) this was a big co-commission for the BBC – £20m was a number being bandied about, although how much NBC (not a massive flop to be fair, but not much to shout about either) contributed to that I don’t know. I don’t think it will be shit, and Rob Brydon is the mystery ingredient that widens the possibility space, but we watched a number of episodes of the original and just didn’t find it that interesting, the hook the show sold itself on (is the clue real or fake?) fades into a pretty standard challenge show background and ultimately the mystery just wasn’t that compelling, although we’d watch a Making Of definitely. However they will have had some time to make format adjustments, but have they done enough? It’s not been a hit anywhere outside Flanders really. The first week is also up against the final week of a resurgent Love Island which yes is watched largely in catch-up, but it’s still good for about a million in overnight it will be priority for. My base case is that it starts well and then drops, in line with everywhere else. Also TwoFour were responsible for Loaded in Paradise on ITVX which was actually good fun even if nobody watched it, so it’s not like they can’t pull off this sort of thing.

And in the blue corner and starting a week later (6th August) and also going out at 9pm on Wednesdays and Thursdays Stephen Mangan is back with the second series of The Fortune Hotel, the first series of which I ended up enjoying even if I went into it not really wanting to, selling tiself as ‘a bit like The Traitors‘ but it isn’t really. I’m hoping that the contestants are a bit more strategically minded this time around, there’s a surprising amount of possible tactics considering the soul of the game is “find the case” of which last year’s lot did not think about using, but the first run definitely felt like a show that had potential. So much so Netflix ripped off its endgame for Million Dollar Secret with Peter Serafinowicz, which must have been galling. The first series was not a massive hit in the overnights but apparently did well on ITVX and with demos, at least they’ve waited to avoid a Love Island clash.

The overnights will be fun – I think with the amount the BBC have pushed Desty X if the first episode starts with a 3, 2, or a 1 corresponds to a success, fine, a sucking in breath through your teeth scenario, ITV will probably be mildly less bothered about The Fortune Hotel, or at least the likelihood of it opening to a 1.Xm number is built in. Really interesting will be the Thursday night retentions. Of course these numbers are good gossip, until the +7s and the demos come in we won’t have an idea of how happy people truly are. Putting these shows out in August feels like A Choice.

In other news Gladiators started filming today and will be filming seemingly though to the 5th August (schedule looks like 23rd-27th Heats, 29th Celebs, 30th-1st Quarters, both Semis on the 3rd and the Final on the 5th) so we ought to get leaks about new stuff in due course.

• ITV have announced Millionaire Hot Seat (alongside 19 new episodes of Millionaire), the fast paced ‘highly tactical’ version of the format with the stupid non-money tree money tree. It began in Italy and then sold to a handful of places, most notably Australia where it ran as a daily show for 2,500+ episodes before The Chase killed it. It didn’t last that long anywhere else. Whether or not you like it seems to depend on whether you can see past the obvious contrivances, it’s probably going in one of the 7:30pm slots on ITV next year. It is better than other Millionaire spin-offs Fastest Finger First and 50:50, to be fair.
• Neil Patrick Harris’ What’s In The Box? recorded for Netflix last weekend and reports we’ve read make it sound legen…wait for it…darily poor! As we undertand it it’s an arc-ed gameshow, couples answer questions to pick spaces off a board, some of which describe a prize in a box and if you uncover enough of them you get what’s in the box, but some spaces are bad and can mean losing prizes to others or even going home. Quote: “Not a total disaster, but very little to commend it other than the grandiose set and prizes. If the prizes hadn’t been sponsored I think there’s a chance they might can it rather than broadcast it to save the prize budget and write the whole lot off as a loss.”
• In happier Netflix news, they’ve announced US and European versions of Bother’s Bar favourite Physical 100, one of the shining lights of the South Korean Authority Voice Sets Tasks genre although they promised Physical 100: Asia 18 months ago and we’ve not heard anything about it since (Q4 this year apparently).
• And now Japan’s getting in on the act with Final Draft which appears to be… basically Physical 100 but with retired sportspeople who may or may not have retired on their own terms, battling it out for 30m Yen. That’s coming August 12th, so not long to wait.

Edit: Destination X going out Wednesdays and Thursdays from 30th July (there was an interview with Rob Brydon in The Telegraph last week that gave this date away, but now it’s confi… sorry, CONFIRMED), a similar schedule to this year’s other big will it/won’t it show “The” Genius Game. But hold! Wasn’t The Fortune Hotel set for Wednesday/Thursday nights as well? A clash of the reality format titans in store! It’s lucky nobody watches linear TV any more.

…is BACK! On November 4th. This feels quite surprising for some reason although it’s been two years since the first one so it shouldn’t be really. Also a third series has been greenlit, although I thought it was recommissioned for two further series anyway, maybe I’m misremembering. Advert doesn’t pick a fight with Mr Beast over which is “bigger”.

I note they seem to be going with ink splats now rather than blood packs.

I’m extremely interested to see if and how they’ve translated some of the games from the recent series, clearly they’re using the five tasks race thing in this trailer, but I’m intrigued to see if they do the Starry Night Hide and Seek from the recent series (which I suspect will have been much too much hassle to actually recreate in real life, but I’d be really interested to know how creatively that was shot and how much set they built for it) amongst other games I’ll not spoil (but they’re definitely going to have to replace the last one).

In other Game of Death news, Alice in Borderland 3 (Squid Game‘s smarter, dare I say better cousin) is out September 25th. Can’t wait!

I’m a bit late to this party, but last week I was petsitting and took the time to catch up on Korea’s Bloody Game on Kocowa (other illegitimate methods are available, but support the creators yo, also I wanted to watch it on a big screen in the front room rather than on a computer monitor) – it doesn’t have the second series (in the UK at least) but it does have the first and most recent.

The first series is fun enough but underwhelming, “what if we did a 6/10 version of The Genius but had a Big Brother style rich house/poor house divide and vote-offs?” the games aren’t especially clever, the setting not that exciting (it’s a mildly nice residence called “the Bloody Mansion” – as in “of blood”), but it does set up its ideas quite nicely, you can use earned money from the challenges to buy extra votes, but that money is also potential prizemoney, and the losers don’t in fact go home, they go and live in the mansion’s secret basement Parasite style where they can spend all day folding up pizza boxes and doing extra tasks for basic living money, occasionally secretly affect the challenges going on upstairs and, the best bit, figure out how to break out and secretly go upstairs and steal the mansion’s niceities until they have a legitimate chance to get back into the game. Perhaps most interesting about the first series is that there’s a five host peanut gallery offering commentary, some of the biggest names in the survival genre game – Sangmin and Dongmin off of The Genius amongst them.

Fast forward to series three which came out last year and what we have could be considered no less than art. It contains three of The Genius‘ most iconic players – Jinho, Dongmin, Kyungran. The first five episodes serve mainly to set up the remainder of the season where it gets going properly, and some of those episodes are anything up to three hours long. There will be brilliant twists that might not pay-off until several episodes down the line. In the main the games are excellent, full of different possible strategies to win, and some of the gameplay is jaw-dropping stuff, if you only watch one episode, the episode with the 7 Notes game features several moments of outside-the-box thinking, play and counter-play, each one more entertaining than the last which I won’t spoil. The opening ten minutes of the first episode features a contestant quickly cracking a code to escape their confines, stuffing several bags with (fake) money and then thinking to set fire to the rest so nobody else can use it to buy advantages – it feels like a real step up. It’s quite a difficult show to like, it takes so much time to watch, but if you’ve got the patience and want something to watch after The Devil’s Plan you should search it out.

…the return of the French Summer games. Fort Boyard starts tomorrow night on France 2, and seeing as the “ghosts of the past” episodes were clearly the most popular of weekly variants they’ve done the last few years they’ve basically themed this entire season around it, Les Origines, Pere Fouras is back in his watchtower and they’ve reinstalled loads of old games albeit with modern twists and loads of old characters are coming back seemingly in an Apprentice-style segment where they’ll get to prove their worth in setting challenges. It’s also seemingly Olivier Minne’s last season since the shock announcement that he’s moving channels this autumn. We’ll be discussing this in #fortboyardchat in the Discord.

But also! Intervilles made a successful return to France 2 last night having been threatening to return for a number of years now, helmed by Nagui and and made by his Air Productions alongside Bruno Guillion. Nagui is apparently channelling Pere Fouras these days. It’s quite an impressive and slick live production for what is quite a large scale and chaotic show and seems to have had some money thrown at it – big party atmosphere, big travelling circus vibe. A couple of interesting new features, as having a live bull threatening to run into contestants is frowned upon these days, each team has a time bank of three minutes for the show where they can deploy their own person dressed as Topo the cow to come on and cause extra disruption to the other team which is a really fun idea that didn’t quite translate into practice last night I don’t think. Another fun idea that didn’t quite work in practice was combining the traditional quiz and tug of war elements into one event – the hosts would ask questions to individuals in turn whilst they were tugging and if they got it wrong they had to leave, over a bit quick, would have been over even quicker when the teams were unbalanced I’d have thought. Also there’s a live viewer competition, you phone up and pick a team to back, one person who backed each team gets phoned back and asked an estimated guess question (“how many steps on the pedometer have the two coaches made since the start of the show?”), nearest guess won a cruise and an extra point for their supported team for the Champions Wall, which as ever feels like a lot of effort throughout the show for not much reward for an all-or-nothing endgame.

That last large paragraph makes it sound like a bit of a mess so to be clear by and large I thought it was a loud, confident and largely successful modern reimagining of the show – I even quite like the new theme tune, presumably they’ve taken the ‘Shananas’ and done it in house to save on licensing, I don’t know – although doubtless there’s a lot of first episode intrigue and its number probably won’t hold across the next month, the final’s on July 24th, we’ll have to see. I think it’s a more successful version of it than the rather soulless Biggest Gameshow In The World incarnation previously.