Well what a story this show has had – a name change from The Money Shot as it’s a bit rude, the mechanism apparently not working on their first set of recordings so it all had to be postponed and reshot more recently… it’s a miracle it seems to have made it at all. But here we are, rewarded with a shoulder peak slot competing against the extremely solid The Hit List rather than Strictly which may or may not work out for it.
In Moneyball, contestants answer questions to load a track with cash, then release a ball and where it lands determines how much they can add to their bank. It’s hosted by football pundit Ian Wright, who was all the rage hosting gameshows about twenty years ago but I think this is probably the first one since The National Lottery Wright Around the World – he was Mr Saturday Night for a bit, I wonder why that stopped?
It feels rather ill-fated but let’s not write write write it off before it lands. Watched it? Let us know what you thought in the comments.
Lots and lots of new shows coming in the next few weeks so don’t you worry.
Right now though, in the calm before the storm, we’ve been alerted to someone uploading all the episodes of American Gladiators to Youtube. AG is meant to be being rebooted soon. This will inevitably be followed by a slightly better UK version, then cancelled after two series.
This post would have been better if there was a Gladiator named Glass, but unfortunately there isn’t, probably because it suggests someone who shatters easily which isn’t a very good attribute for a Gladiator. Still though.
I’ll give them this: for a show which seemed like the most pointless revival in the world, GamesMaster In Association With Oculus Rift 2 continues to impress with its decisions – location and hosts are all great choices, and overnight it’s been suggested that Sir Trev is going to be the GM and really that’s a very difficult decision to argue with.
Sir Trevor McDonald to star as GamesMaster when show returns later this year https://t.co/9crJIMj8XJ
Just… please don’t expect us to take e-sports seriously.
In other news, rather brilliantly over the weekend we were alerted to THREE episodes of The Perfect Crime uploaded to Youtube, the Dutch version of Swap Team/Valvet whatever. It’s roughly the same format as the Swedish one – a team of three takes on the tower, once they reach the safe it’s everyone for themselves, a couple of elimination games then the eventual winner taking on the maze against the clock. Fun stuff, deserved more.
This dropped into my Netflix recommendations this morning as I was about to watch an episode of Baking Impossible and thought it looked quite interesting – I can’t say I’ve seen much Spanish reality. From the first five minutes – oh, it’s basically Big Brother, but in truth it’s actually a bit more interesting and insidious than that.
Twelve contestants think they’ve made the final round of casting for the show, and the last stage is two weeks staying in the house that they don’t believe is being filmed, because they’re idiots apparently who have never come across the idea of one-way mirrors, whilst doing tests in the “workroom” (which they know IS being filmed). Each contestant is wearing a wristband that apparently is tracking everyone’s emotions, and this is all fed into their individual pie chart and discussed by a casting coach, the idea, as far as they’re concerned, is to try and “scientifically” come up with the perfect reality show contestant and to see how far they’re willing to go for $100,000. The question the show seems to be trying to ask: are people different when they don’t think they’re being filmed?
However what the contestants think the show is, and what the viewers think the show is are rather different and I suspect by the end of the run our positions will have changed again. Two episodes of seven in we’ve been introduced to a fake contestant, two fake “bad cop” producers, a confidentially break, mess, tears and tantrums and evictions and nothing is quite what it seems – only that reading the episode synopses ahead, there IS a game and there IS $100,000 at stake and at some point everyone’s going to find out they were being filmed the whole time.
The show is hosted by actress Najwa Nimri who apparently can’t sit in a chair properly and the direction goes slightly overboard with “look how mysterious this all is” in quite an annoying way, but I’d be lying if I said that it wasn’t interesting enough that I wasn’t going to finish the series – it’s only seven episodes long and each one is about 45 minutes.
If you were expecting a Plays Badly video on the new Koh-Lanta Microids game that was apparently getting released last week – so was I! However a check on all the storefronts suggests that it hasn’t actually been released for whatever reason.
