ABC Needs Contestants for “Bingo Night”

25 Apr

Posted by Alex Davis as ABC, Casting, National Bingo Night

They casted the audience already so I suppose they figured it was time to find some contestants. ABC is looking for people to participate in their newest game show National Bingo Night which debuts on Friday, May 18th, at 9PM ET. On this show, one contestant will play bingo against the audience. Sounds exciting, doesn’t it? No idea on the top prize yet, but it is saying you can win cash and prizes, and I’d be shocked if it was anything less than $500,000 to be perfectly honest. Why not try? If you enjoy bingo and can stand in a studio of screaming people while watching balls flying back and forth, here’s your chance. Click here to apply.

I know I’ll get a comment about why I am bitching about this show before it airs so I’ll explain. Watching bingo is not fun: period. ABC did a smart thing by letting people print out their own bingo cards to play or else this would be a total waste of time. Judging by some early reports, there is no risk. You just sit there and hope everything works out. Now I know I’m being over dramatic and I know there will be some places in the game where the contestant will have to gamble everything to continue, but I just don’t think bingo will be fun and exciting to watch on TV. I also have issues with how they are casting some of the audience. They specifically casted female models to be audience members and to be seated in on-camera positions just so they can show that the place is a party. If you can’t get the audience excited about the show and are forced to hire models to make bingo sexy, I just think it’s a bad sign. It’s what FOX did for Fifth Grader’s contestants. I’m going to give it an honest shot and I hope I am wrong, but it’s just my early opinion that this will be boring and make me crave 1 VS 100’s return even more. What are your early opinions?

Edit: Casting link fixed. Sorry about the wrong link up there.

7 Responses

Scott Meckley
1
April 25th, 2007 at 5:25 pm

I could be wrong about this but I think this is going to be one of those short lived shows. It just seems boring and I think that if ABC wants to run a show they should’ve done The Con Test (Pokerface). The Con Test was a show to me that has hit written all over it where as this has disaster written all over it but I will have to watch it to see if I can be proven wrong which I hope I can be. I think at this point ABC needs me to write some gameshows.
Brandon
2
April 25th, 2007 at 7:33 pm

ABC needs “Millionaire” back desperately. Even in a Friday night slot the show would probably do respectably. Or did Disney already give up the primetime rights?

Also, I saw the Australian “Con Test” on Youtube. Whoever passed this up for “Show Me the Money” should be blacklisted from Hollywood. I don’t want to prejudge this, but why ABC won’t at least make an effort to make some challenging game shows is beyond me.
Antonio
3
April 25th, 2007 at 9:31 pm

Give this show a try before judging anything about it and nobody is making you watching it if you don’t want to. I like bingo so I’ll be watching but they need to put on another day to get more people to watch….
Max
4
April 25th, 2007 at 9:34 pm

>>>>>”On this show, one contestant will play bingo against the audience. Sounds exciting, doesn’t it?”

Yeah, it really does! I remember on a previous article, you said that it’ll kinda be like 1 vs. 100. Except, it’ll be like 1 vs. 3 or 400(’cuz I highly doubt that audiences are only 100 people these days except for maybe Chain Reaction). I really like this awesome idea of 1 person playing against an entire audience. It’s never been done before! I’m so excited to see how this show will turn out. Hopefully, it turns out well.
David Howell
5
April 26th, 2007 at 3:00 am

Con.Test/PokerFace would work, if anything, better for you guys than it did for us. We aren’t so keen on people acting all mean and manipulative and cocky to win lots of money, whereas I doubt US audiences would care so much.

National Bingo Night doesn’t look like it’ll be that amazing, though we’ll see. Casting models in the audience is not a good sign.

ABC have indeed passed up the primetime rights for Millionaire.

I’ve been at a taping (for the UK version of a show even ABC seem to have turned down, Set For Life) where about 30 people showed up… they literally had two blocks of six rows of about eight seats, all the rest of the rows of the audience (at least as many again) were covered in black sheeting, and and even then we didn’t come close to filling it up for our taping. Much as I enjoyed the experience of my first taping, I can understand why nobody would show up for it…
Bob
6
April 26th, 2007 at 7:46 am

I spent six weeks working in Sydney Australia a couple of months ago and got hooked on the Con Test. It airs Thursday nights on Channel 10. I thought it would be boring, boy was I wrong. What a great game of bluffing! Counting down the 10 seconds to see if anyone would fold made for good t.v. The interviews in the Fold Room where fun to watch. The top prize for this show is $50,000 in Australia. Lets import this to the U.S, and make the top prize $500,000. Now that would be exciting.
David Howell
7
April 26th, 2007 at 5:27 pm

Or import our tournament format, where we had six heats for £50k but that then became stake money for a final where the question values were doubled and the final winner got £1m. That’s $2m… tax-free, too.

Offering a guaranteed $1m in a tournament format could be a useful tool for ABC as an August sweeps tool; Sunday-Friday heats and a final the next Sunday.

Alternatively, ITV here used it stripped over a week in July immediately after the World Cup, and it served as a lead-in for several new or returning shows. ABC could try that one for a week in January or September.