A letter dated December 17th was sent to the F.C.C. from a parent of a contestant.  The parent raises several complaints about Our Little Genius which are now being investigated.  The most damning of them all is the allegation of questions being disclosed before the show.  The New York Times states, “The letter alleges that a few days before a planned taping, a member of the program’s production staff reviewed with the contestant and his parents a list of potential topics and gave specific answers to at least four questions that the child either did not know or about which he was unsure.”  This claim was also given to us by other sources, so we’ve got multiple people saying the same thing here.

The letter also states answers were given as well.  Again, the New York Times article states, “For example, the letter states that when the child said that he didn’t know the British system of naming musical notes, he was told by the production staff member the names of four specific notes that “he needed to know,” including semibreve for whole note, crotchet for quarter note and quaver for eighth note. “He told us that it was very important to know that the hemidemisemiquaver is the British name for the sixty-fourth note,” the letter says.” We were not told this, but given how everything else has matched up there’s no reason to doubt it.

The other allegation is that contestants who missed one of the first four questions were allowed to retry the game with new questions, and this has been confirmed by audience members.  Also confirmed by audience members is switching out questions due to what staff calls “technical errors”, and suddenly a question the child knows appears.

So there we are.  We’ve got official confirmation from our initial reports that contestants were given questions beforehand, contestants allowed to restart games, questions being switched, and now answers being given.  Audience members and second/third reports given directly to us back up everything but the giving away of answers, which we did not know.

This is just about as bad as it gets.  This is looking to all be true given the overwhelming evidence.  It’s a modern quiz show scandal.  It’s career damaging for many, many of which who do not deserve it.  A report given to us did confirm that when Mark Burnett, the executive producer, discovered what was going on he, in earnest, pulled the plug on the show.  So that part was completely honest, and good on him.  But it may be too late, though I certainly hope not.  You also have to wonder how much it’ll affect other game/quiz shows.  It’s a legitimate scandal in our genre, and we will be following it intensely.

The situation on Fox’s now-canceled quiz show Our Little Genius is pretty bad.  It would have been larger news if the NBC late night ordeal wasn’t happening at the same time.  To bring people up to speed if you are behind: Fox pulled Our Little Genius less than a week before its debut because there was an, “issue with how some information was relayed to contestants during…pre-production,” according to executive producer Mark Burnett.  Some audience reports from Hollywood Junket are shedding some more light on this.

We briefly discussed this first issue.  The child contestants were guaranteed $10,000.  It takes three questions to reach the $10,000 milestone.  If a kid doesn’t reach that point and loses earlier, they stopped tape and brought back the contestant to restart the game.  It’s a bit shady and dumb, but so many shows have done it that I’m not calling shenanigans on this part.  Million Dollar Password had a similar rule originally where contestants would get two shots going for the first milestone of $25,000.  A lot of shows pick and choose the episodes to air and shelve others because they are deemed not exciting, so stuff like this happens.  It sucks and it shouldn’t, but it does.

This one is, again, a report HollywoodJunket.com.  The category of a question is given to the kid before the decision to stop with the money or play the question is stated by the parents.  In one game attended by the entertainment website, the category was given and the kid said he didn’t know it. At this point taping was stopped for a few minutes.  After this, the game began again and a new category was given.  The kid knew this category well and the game proceeded.  Someone from the show afterwards, to brush the situation off, said it was a “technical error” and the categories were “mixed up by mistake”.

So we’ve got this and we’ve got the alleged preproduction issues reported by the New York Times where information about the topics in the game were given out to the contestants in some way, and the two probably sync up somewhere along the line.  If all this alleged information true it’s just about as bad as you can get without giving the kids the answers on a piece of paper beforehand.  I’ll repeat again: it’s not that hard to make a game show.  Mark Burnett is a fantastic reality producer; one of the best.  But we’re trying to shove the reality-mentality of the picture perfect show where every moment is produced to the point of being scripted.  It can’t happen.  More information will be coming in during the next few days, so stay posted.

So it seems information about questions or the topics were exposed in some way, shape, or form.  There’s no other information that can be given out that would cause the show to be pulled beyond information specific to the material or topic of the questions.  It leaked out somehow.  Maybe someone got ahold of it through other means.  Maybe during contestant briefings too much was given away.  There’s no full explanation yet so we can’t comment on this.  Great job not picking up The Cube and taking this instead, Fox!  Here’s a statement by executive producer Mark Burnett:

“I recently discovered that there was an issue with how some information was relayed to contestants during the pre-production of ‘Our Little Genius.’ As a result, I am not comfortable delivering the episodes without re-shooting them. I believe my series must always be beyond reproach, so I have requested that Fox not air these episodes.”

And if I had to take a guess I’d say this actually means the lawyers got on their asses and did this.  I could be wrong as always, but it makes more sense than sitting on this information for weeks before suddenly saying, “You know what, let’s pull the plug,” a few days before debut.

This has been a major issue with game shows this decade and it finally came to its breaking point now.  The amount of production done to these shows to turn them into the absolute perfect product teeters on sickening and they went too far.  What we were given by most production companies in this primetime era were semi-scripted dramas, not game shows.  I mean nothing will change because of this.  The show still may air.  This sort of stuff is just annoying.  Why do so few producers understand this genre?  It’s not hard to get.  Mark Burnett is clearly a fantastic reality producer.  He’s given us some of the best in the genre and I enjoy his Shark Tank especially.  But this isn’t a reality show.  Game shows are treated differently.  You let the show happen.  When you produce everything to a point of being anal, what do you get?  You get Our Little Genius, and you get a lot of wasted money on a show that won’t air.

Thanks to Michael Hetrick for the link to the original New York Times story on this.

Edit: I removed a few things that weren’t needed in the original dialog and cleaned it up a bit.

1: I do like the idea that the family member has control of the game, not the player.  Now I know this was probably for legal reasons because I’m not sure of the legality of a ten year old gambling $350,000, but I do like the mechanic.  Another show called Set For Life used it, but the show was so god awful I didn’t bother to recognize it.  I think it’s an interesting format twist and this show actually used it properly.  It puts the parents in the game because they aren’t sure of the faith of the child answering.  This idea would work for an adult game in reality in the same fashion.

2: I do like that it’s actually a hard quiz.  Fox and Mark Burnett actually scoured the country for very smart children, experts in some particular area, for a true test of their genius.  It’s not a multiple choice show where they have to guess to win.  It’s a show where all they have is a multi-part question and they have to reason their way out of it.  It’s definitely unique in this day and age and it’s something to look forward to.  Look, the genre has been missing a hard new quiz show for an extremely long time.  I bitch endlessly about Are You Smarter Than a Fifth Grader being Millionaire for dumbasses, so I’d be a hypocrite not to praise this show for actually attempting to make things challenging.

3: The show actually rewards intelligence.  I know this is going to sound lame, but there hasn’t been a show which has rewarded actual big intelligence in an extremely long time.  Furthermore it really places these smart kids in the forefront and shows how great they are.  I mean you aren’t going to be able to root against a child playing.  Most quiz shows that have come out this decade are tests of how amazing it is you don’t know something.  This show makes you sit back and think, “Wow, I’m amazed that kid knows that, congratulations.”

So it’s not a laundry list of stuff, but Our Little Genius has a few things going for it.  I still think it has massive issues and I think it’s a giant mistake to pick this instead of The Cube, but I could be really wrong.  I’d just like to see one remotely original format come out.  It’s possible.  This is just reverse Fifth Grader, and the kids weren’t what made Fifth Grader popular.  We’ll see January 13th at 9:00PM ET on Fox.

If you’ve seen Fifth Grader you essentially know how this is going to work.  One child genius answers questions in a particular field.  Each right answer moves him or her up the money ladder.  Questions aren’t multiple choice.  Unlike Fifth Grader where you choose questions based on a grade level, questions on this show are based by categories like “College”, “Masters”, and “Doctorate”.  A wrong answer drops you down to the safety net ($10,000) if you reached that.  The only catch in the show is that the kid’s parents decide if they will continue the show, risking the money, or not.  It’s kind of like a football father pushing his child so hard to play just to have the glory of it.  Three experts are on set to tell the parents if the child should continue or not, judging by the difficulty of the questions left.  Two lifelines can be used.  One lets the parents see the question before decision.  Another lets the experts preview the question.  The money chain is as follows:

$1,000; $5,000; $10,000; $25,000; $50,000; $100,000; $175,000; $250,000; $350,000; $500,000

Oh look, ten questions and money levels.  What does that remind you of?  Hmm, that money chain is awfully familiar, too.  This show bugs me for so many reasons.  I just want to look at this money chain first.  Are you freaking telling me that some really irresponsible parent will let a child risk $340,000; on that final question, to gain $150,000 more?  Seriously?  I mean just this whole project reeks of unoriginality and trying to recapture that magic that Fifth Grader caught, and it just isn’t going to.  There are so many things against it.

The experts are wholly unnecessary if they are going to be there just to say, “Stop”, or “Go” the entire time.  The whole grade determination of the questions is really derivative of every single Fox quiz show which isn’t a huge surprise.  Hollywood Junket is also saying that host Kevin Pollak wasn’t a good fit and they’re pretty on the ball with this stuff.  The good/interesting parts, for starters, are that the questions aren’t multiple choice.  You have to know these things front to back.  I know some others don’t like it but I actually enjoy the game mechanic of someone else determining your fate.  No one’s implemented it correctly yet and this seems like a step in the right direction but still not there.  But that’s it in terms of something different.  If Fifth Grader is Millionaire for Dumbasses Our Little Genius is Fifth Grader for smart kids.

I just don’t see what they see in this format other than it’s going to be cheaper to produce, and I guarantee that’s why this was chosen over The Cube.  But the reason Fifth Grader is popular is because they really tested adults to see if they can remember the stuff from grade school, and their kids could compete to.  Say what you want about it but in retrospect it was a genius idea.  Our Little Genius is quizzing us on stuff we’re flat out told we won’t know.  Then why should I care to watch?

Still not a ton is known about the show.  The essential rules are a child genius will answer increasingly hard questions for a ton of money.  The parents will decide when the game should stop.  So imagine Who Wants to be a Millionaire but the person in the companion seat decides when to walk away, not the player.  This idea was tried a few years back on ABC’s short lived abomination Set For Life.  I seriously lasted around five minutes before I gave up on that: did the idea of someone else stopping the game for you work well?

Taping starts Friday and we’ll be getting feedback from some audience members, so stand by.  If you live in the Los Angeles area and you want tickets to see tapings of the show, click here.  Our Little Genius will debut Wednesday, January 13th, on Fox.