He REALLY took a big risk to get that $200K– the other amount left was $5, and he turned down $102,500 to be exact. (As a matter of fact, that was the first clip of any version of DoND I saw– Dean taking home 200 grand in Australia. :-))

And yes, I do wish to congratulate Jessica and Laura in their respective countries winning their grand prizes. :-) At least the foreign versions don’t seem to have big wins shown in promos on TV until after the episode airs, much like what CBS does most of the time. If only ABC, NBC, and Fox could do the same thing…

Bad news? DOND has still “jumped the shark,” only made worse by its inability to keep its f*****g promotional mouth shut.

Pretty much ever since DoND premiered and ushered in a new game show trend, one of the trademarks of every show is the way they use, overuse, and abuse the cliffhanger. Every segment has to end with a case chosen but not opened, an answer given but not resolved, a choice made but not revealed. The reason, of course, is to coerce viewers into sitting through another three and a half minutes of commercials to find out the results of that decision. Be it DoND, or 5th Grader, or Duel, or Power of 10, the general sentiment of producers on every network is that they don’t trust you enough to watch their commercials, and so they have to bait you with a cliffhanger just to avoid running the risk of losing you to the remote.

It’s incredibly ironic, then, that NBC decided to go in the complete opposite direction when it comes to its first $1M winner on DoND. Instead of overblowing the suspense as they’ve done pretty much since the show’s inception, they eliminate the suspense entirely. For the very same reason that they have for all the extraneous suspense – that they don’t trust viewers to watch their ads – they spill the beans beforehand.

If I ever got a show on one of these networks, I’d have a clause in the contract forbidding them from ever spoiling an outcome.

I stopped watching “Deal or No Deal” ages ago, and I don’t plan on going back (at least until the Syndicated version drops anchor). Thank goodness for online footage. Now the real question remains: will we see an African-American or Latino-American contestant break the bank as the next Million-Dollar winner? (I sure hope so, because, with the lone exception of TPiR’s Million-Dollar spectacular, all the million-dollar winners were white, aside from Dr. Tim Hsieh of “It’s Your Chance of A Lifetime” fame.)