I just wanted to highlight a new Talpa Dutch quiz which started going out recently, In De Ring (it means In The Ring) as it seems to have lit up the Discord over the past week, and it’s already sold to Australia. Having watched it, I can’t quite decide if it’s clever or annoying or both or neither. If you want to watch it yourself you can watch it with a VPN (protip: browsers such as Microsoft Edge will autotranslate the subs as well).
Postcode Loterij In De Ring sees Dutch television icon Linda de Mol challenge two people working as a team in the middle of a set of 12 concentric rings try and knock out a horde of 100 Outsiders, who are there all series long, in a bid to win €50,000 – the money will be given away no matter what, but will our team take it or will members of the Outsiders?
The Outsiders have all answered a lot of limited-list questions pre-show (think questions in the original Pointless style). Their job is to answer each question to the best of their ability with the least-obvious least-obvious answers, because if the players in the ring match any of their answers they are eliminated from the game. Sidenote: we don’t know what happens if any of the Outsiders submit incorrect answers.
Twelve concentric rings, each representing a question, stand between the horde of Outsiders and the players In The Ring, the main portion of the game is played in the outer eleven. A question pops up, and on the table in front of the players a rather sexy looking pie-chart comes up which shows the distribution of answers, but unlabelled so not what those answers are. The players must answer the question correctly, but also answer it so that it matches and knocks out as many people as possible (we presume if they give an incorrect answer then they’ve wasted the question and everyone advances).
For example, if the question is “name a song on Queen’s Greatest Hits volume 1”, the pie chart shows an answer with 24, an answer with 14, an answer with 10 and so on. The obvious answer is Bohemian Rhapsody, but the Outsiders know that’s the obvious answer and will try and pick something else. The players in the ring know that’s the obvious answer as well, so will try and predict a different answer more people have gone with. Once they’ve locked in, if the answer is right, floor lasers shoot out of the Ring and turn the Outsiders medallions red and eliminating them if they’ve matched. In this instance Bicycle Race was the answer to pick as 24 people chose it – through a lack of knowledge or second-or-third guessing, Bohemian Rhapsody would have knocked 10 out.
To help the team In The Ring they have two jokers which they can only play provided they’ve given a correct answer, and only once each through the game – they can change their answer (if they discover they’ve knocked out two people when they could have knocked out 20, for example) or they can give a second answer (take out two chunks of of people with one question). As the Outsiders are the same every episode, Linda frequently gets a chance to banter with the more familiar faces.
Repeat until the 12th question, the Golden Ring, and this is the chance for the Players in the ring and the handful of Outsiders left to win money. A question with precisely 10 correct answers is asked – we’ve had Pointless, now it’s Tenable – and once again we get a pie chart of how everyone has answered. To win the money, the Players in the ring must keep giving correct answers until all the remaining Outsiders have been knocked out. To help they have one “insurance” answer – an answer they can give that won’t incur a penalty if it’s incorrect, although it’s wasted if they give an insured answer and it’s right. Otherwise, with the first wrong answer they give, any Outsiders still in the game split €25,000 equally, but the players In The Ring can still win the other half. A second wrong answer means any remaining Outsiders split the other €25,000 also and it’s game over.
It’s certainly watchable and at about 45 minutes doesn’t outstay its welcome, but with questions that aren’t horrifically difficult it’s very difficult to know how to strategise really. Whatsmore, I’m not sure how much difference knocking out the horde has when it comes to the endgame, if you have lots of people remaining they’re probably going to clump around certain answers and you’ll probably need 7-8 of them, if you have few people remaining you’re probably still going to have to scattergun 7-8 correct answers to hit the right ones to knock them out, so it’s all much of a muchness really.
It’s already selling, so it will be interesting to see if this becomes Talpa’s next The Floor. I don’t think it’s quite as good, but it’s not rubbish.