Netflix,
From 17th December
Neil Patrick Harris invites eight teams to figure out what prizes are in 12 giant boxes by way of quiz, the team with the most prizes at the end of the arced series wins what’s in the SUPER BOX worth over $250k – I know what this is but I will leave it as a surprise. Opening the box doesn’t necessarily mean you will keep the prize as there are ways and means to steal prizes and eliminate other teams across the series.
It’s Netflix trying another high stakes shiny floor quiz, an entertainment form they’ve tried to crack before and not really succeeded at. Will this break their duck? There’s not much hype about it. Also we know someone who went and saw some episodes being filmed and they weren’t very impressed, but perhaps it will edit extremely well and become a Christmas hit. UK production company Rollercoaster are behind it, the hitmakers behind You Bet On Tour and I’ve got an “I thought rollercoasters were meant to go up as well as down” gag lined up to go viral on Twitter if this doesn’t work, so everything to play for.
Watched it? Let us know what you thought in the comments!
Big scale but also irritating and actually a bit stodgy and boring. It’s quite difficult not to make your mind up about it in the first two minutes really, extremely US coded pre-titles and within the first few minutes we discover it’s a quiz with both confessionals AND Gogglebox cams, so we know we’re in for a feast of overreaction and removal from the action. The “ooh there’s STRATEGY” chat is a bit overwrought, for all the talk of “alliances” you’re going to knobble over the team with the most amount of prizes at any point and I am as well.
The quiz elements are *fine*, although there’s usually an easy answer that you can be fairly confident of being first or last. Playing the board is not that exciting, although kudos to whoever came up with “extra turn”, a wild card that carries no actual game changing or decision making function whatsoever. Two episodes in nothing has come up that has any real bite – a steal, sure, but the threat of elimination needs to kick in a lot sooner – whether this was always there but production got a bit unlucky I don’t know.
The contents of the boxes are *luxury*, sure, but for a big reveal they’re not really greatly exciting or surprising. What’s In The Box? Pretty much what you were anticipating from the three word clues and the name of the box. It’s quite an underwhelming mystery.
Neil Patrick Harris is fine. Surprised Netflix bothered to pay for an audience given you only see them in shadow behind him at some points, and they don’t seem quite as enthusiastic as the sound suggests.
I’ll give the format run-down as usual, but with no spoilers. As of writing, I am 3 episodes in, and there are 6 episodes in the series.
8 pairs attempt to win life-changing prizes hidden inside 12 giant boxes on the main stage, the pair with the most prizes over the series playing for the Super Box, as Brig says, with a prize worth over $250,000 inside it.
The gameplay loop begins with the 8 pairs being asked a numerical closest-to question (e.g. the first one asked was ‘How many windows are there on the Empire State Building?’) to gain control of a box picked at random with a 2-word clue as to its contents (e.g. the first box was ‘Open Road’). The pair in control is then tasked to put 4 items in the correct order. 0 correct loses control of the box and we go to another closest-to question, 1 correct gives 1 turn, 2 correct gives 2 turns and all 4 correct gives 3 turns. The pair is then presented with 13 numbers. Behind some of those numbers are words, with only 3 of them relating to the prize, the rest being decoys. If a pair runs out of turns and there are words revealed, they must be played, but decoy words don’t cost control of the box. There are also Wildcards hidden in the numbers that can help or hinder. If the pair is still in control after using their turns, they play another list question. This continues until a pair finds and locks in the 3 words that unlock the prize.
Maybe after a while, discussions about the Wildcards can be had, but I wanted to keep this spoiler-free for now. Unlike Brig, I actually quite like this show and wonder if this kind of format should have been used for Win Win instead of what we got, but your mileage may vary, as ever.
I don’t really get why Netflix still occasionally commissions these types of shows. There’s clearly no demand from people to watch an original quiz show on Netflix. This certainly didn’t make the top 10 in the UK and I’m pretty sure it didn’t in the US either and you could tell that would be the case before it even dropped.
From a development point of view it’s a bit annoying as we’re always trying to find ways to bring prizes back to the forefront of gameshows but actually this does kind of prove that even big prizes feel kind of underwhelming these days.