Exciting “1 VS 100″ Moment, Plus New Ratings
GSN’s 1 VS 100 seems to have sprung a leak. The most recent ratings come from November 24th. The 7:00PM ET airing got 376,000 viewers, down almost 200,000 from its debut. For comparison, Newlywed Game at 6:00PM ET got 480,000 and Baggage at 6:30PM ET had 531,000. The primetime reruns saw 528,000 for Newlywed, Baggage at 512,000, and 1 VS 100 at 310,000. There’s a noticeable drop there. I don’t really know what they can do to fix it. Most regular comments I hear don’t distinguish the difference between the NBC and GSN version and complain about cheapness, and there’s not a lot you can do about that beyond shout at people, “You know we’re on cable now, right?”
I’ve gone repeatedly on the record saying I would have done the show drastically different, but it’s the first genuine quiz show GSN has done in I don’t know how long and while it’s got faults it has the potential to produce some exciting moments. One of these moments happened last week. Take a look. I am curious, though, beyond adding a mammoth cash prize GSN is just not capable of, would you have changed anything about 1 VS 100? I’ll chime in in the comments if I see some other people doing it.
How about cutting it down to 1 vs. 50 and re-adding the live mob? It’s just not as entertaining with a pre-recorded mob. I’d rather have a live mob of 50 than what they have now.
The show needs to straddle, none of this self contained show. You can look at the clock and guess how its going to end. The pace will quicken, i think DOD had the same problem
Correct me if I’m wrong, but I believe that clip above came from a game that straddled?
Great point, except they definitely do straddle in this version! lol.
I saw this episode when it aired. Loved that question writing!
I personally think GSN can’t do any better on their budget without altering the show drastically like Steve mentioned above. I miss the live mob b/c it allows some awesome moments of interaction that you don’t really get on this show. I think CAI does a much more than passable job here, plus the contestants I’ve seen aren’t annoying. But still there’s something missing and it’s that live mob IMHO.
In my opinion, I think the show would succeed if it was brought back to the one hour network primetime format on maybe CBS since they are lacking in game shows. Bring Saget back and go to the orginal format of the show. Don’t give it some awful time slot and don’t screw with the show or air it three times a week!!! That would work best in my opinion. That way the mob could be back and it would be a really fun show. NBC likes to screw up their game shows, although so far they have done a good job with Minute to Win It
The show on GSN is fine as is, with one exception. Carrie Ann Inaba needs to go. She isn’t cutting it, and it feels to me she’s getting worse. Honestly, I think Richard Karn would have done a better job than she has done.
Bob Saget and Chuck Woolery would be my picks, since they’re both used to hosting expensive primetime game shows. :)
I really think that if you’re going to go with a low maximum cash prize, as GSN has done, you need to go with one of the foreign formats. Why not do it a bit like the British version? They could give away $500 for each mob member eliminated instead of a 1000 Pounds, and then eliminated the double all together, leading to a top prize of $50,000 ifno escapes are used.
I would definitely change this show back to a live mob: this would make it seem fairer for the “1″ facing the mob.
Next, I would change the structure of the knockouts:
5 knocked out: $500
10 knocked out: $1,000
25 knocked out: $5,000
50 knocked out: $10,000
75 knocked out: $25,000
90 knocked out: $50,000
All 100: $100,000
I believe $100,000 for GSN isn’t breaking the bank (Russian Roulette offered this back in the early 2000s) and they did offer higher prizes on their casino games (i.e. World Series of Blackjack’s $250,000 top prize)
As far as Carrie Ann, she has done a much better job than expected. I wouldn’t replace her unless Bob Saget came available.
Some plusses of the current show: seems to be a little bit quicker-paced than the NBC version, they have the early style of question writing, and the host (Carrie Ann) is pretty good.
Don’t forget Bingo America!!!!! They gave away $100,000 on that show too!!!!!
No, I honestly think it would be better if we did forget that. :P
the biggest problem I have is the host, Carrie Ann’s not terrible IMO but not great either. and she needs to stop reminding contestants “you’re working your way up to $50,000″ after every single question.
Someone mentioned an idea before on here of having the 1 play against 100 people playing on GSN.com, I shot down that idea before because it would have to be done live, but after re-thinking it that could work. albeit there may be an occasional ep. with tech. problems or whatever but live TV would make it more exciting cause you don’t what’ll happen next. Plus if they wanted to keep Carrie Ann as host I think she’d be better since she’s more used to live TV.
The show is really lacking with the “virtual” mob. It just doesn’t work, and there’s no element of spontaneity. They need living, breathing humans up there to make things more exciting.
I also am not a huge fan of Carrie Ann as a host at the moment…too much yelling and dancing and singing, and she comes across like a high school cheerleader. She’s pleasant enough, has potential, but she needs to tone it WAY down.
I’m a huge fan of the show and try to watch it every night. I don’t mind Carrie Ann or the video mob. I enjoy the questions and although it would be nice to have a live mob, it doesn’t really bother me!!!
Honestly the only problem I have with the show is the money. You can eliminate 79% of the mob and still only be at $5,000.
If you’re going to do a money tree style show, then you’d better offer some real $$$ or the ratings are going to continue to sink.
I have three main problems with the format.
1) Carrie is a decent host, but she does not fit at all into this particular format. This is a game whose atmosphere is driven by tension and impossible odds, and her incredibly positive attitude and repetitive comments don’t fit in with the drama it tries to create.
2) The Mob isn’t a clear ‘evil’ entity like it was in the network runs, if only because each one is just a few pixels big on most of the camera shots. Try to pick out the live players in your peripheral vision in the above shot–it’s next to impossible. You can still keep a virtual mob, but focus much more on your active players. Something as simple as changing the layout at every tier so that the pictures of the active mob members get larger would be effective.
3) Speaking of the money tree, the current one does a horrible job of creating suspense. You have no motivation to quit until the last four tiers, and once that happens, you have no reason to continue on and try to eliminate another nine people for the next payout. Altering the second half of the money tree so that the required mob members you have to eliminate to advance tapers off, something like this:
X – $100,000
XX – $75,000
XX – $50,000
XXX – $30,000
XXX – $20,000
XXXX – $15,000
XXXXX – $12,500
XXXXXX – $10,000
XXXXXXX – $7,500
XXXXXXXX – $5,000
XXXXXXXXX – $3,000
XXXXXXXXXX – $2,000
XXXXXXXXXX – $1,500
XXXXXXXXXX – $1,000
XXXXXXXXXX – $500
XXXXXXXXXX – $250
As Kevin C. pointed out, they’ve had $100,000 prizes before, and this structure doesn’t dramatically change the amount of money given away while creating suspense–something a money tree should strive to do.
Hearing that this show was revived makes me incredibly excited, but I hope it can tweak itself into a more presentably and exciting show before it loses its chance to shine.
One of the things that’s wrong with this show is that the mob questions are already asked, so there’s nothing to say that they aren’t stacking the deck to make the budget balance.
According to a friend who is in the mob on the current version, they were told that the question stacks for the one were already set before the mob answered the questions. The mob answered over 600 questions during 2 “testing sessions.” Someone from the mob asked, “What happens if we get all the questions correct?” They were told that they wouldn’t be in the mob. So, in every question stack, the mob is set up so that it’s possible for the One to go all the way. This is one of the things that bothers me. If a contestant gets a 10 question stack, for example, and one of the potential “mobbers” gets all 10 right, they wouldn’t be in that particular mob. So it’s like they’re penalizing intelligence. I would flub every tenth question on purpose, just so I would have the chance to be in more mobs.
What needs to change? The host.
I hate to sound mean, but they need to find someone who is a competent host for this game. She has been the main reason that a lot of people that I’ve talked to aren’t regular watchers.
I really don’t think a $50,000 prize is bad. Frankly I was waiting for $25,000. It’s better than anything else GSN has and it’s far from impossible. If you throw giant dollar values around like NBC did, everyone stops which makes it seem incredibly hard. Reduce the prize to GSN levels and people will go further more often. Russian Roulette/Bingo America could do a $100K prize because it was random. There was a fighting chance no one would have a shot at winning ever. 1 VS 100 has to have a definite obtainable end point and they just can’t do a $100K prize.
My problem is that the show takes a very long time to get anywhere exciting because there’s no drama seeing someone think about gambling with anything between $500 and $1500, and that’s just an issue with the money chain system. I still think a massively scaled back bounty system would have been best. Start it at $50 a head and increments of $50 and it would have just about the same pay scale as the current version while bypassing the laughably small values no one seriously considers.
Frankly I would have gone far more European with the format just because NBC’s version has some issues that were masked by hundreds of thousands of dollars being thrown around quickly, but really my only main issue is it takes forever to build up to any level of drama. With how TV is today you need to bring them in instantly and trying to create a dramatic moment for around $1,000 doesn’t work. However, the show does a pretty nice job of creative dramatic moments in the final few stages. They just need to find a way to fast forward to that stage.
The pullout is first offered at the $1000 level or beyond…
It still doesn’t change the fact they are trying to create these giant dramatic moments for around $1,000 or $1,500 which is incredibly hard to do. It would be easier to just skate past those levels as quickly as possible instead of dragging them out.
I’d consider 6-1 odds better than a fighting chance, Alex.
I have to agree that, for a better format, just take the Dutch format and change the euro to the dollar. Other than that, this show is so boring, it beats Deal or No Deal and its boredom level on the list of WORST game shows.
I have to say the revival of a primetime version would have been exceptionally grand (maybe either CBS or ABC) and probably with an updated payoff structure format using the Season 1 format (and maybe have the questions be extremely difficult in the high levels with easy questions early) would be great. Show would be live and had four helps with two versions of each of the three help (i.e.: you can Ask (Mob or Crowd; audience members), Trust (Mob or Crowd) and Poll (you get the idea.) FOurth help is Ask the Brain. And since the idea of the show would be basically from the XBOX version, the show would be a hit live.
I see your points, but NOTHING can beat Deal or No Deal on the boring level. Deal or No Deal has absolutely NO intelligence, NO skill, and NO questions that actually make the show interesting.
The only problem with the European format is that it disallows quitting. But then again, once you factor in the complicated math to figure out how much you’ve earned so far, it doesn’t really total up to much. It might be a good idea for GSN.
I say augment the UK National Lottery version thusly:
Bounty on each mob member ($500), two escapes (halving winnings) instead of three, and the double made available starting on question 3 ($1000 per “mobster” for only that one Q where the double is used). Oh yeah, AND A LIVE MOB (tho the virtual mob Carrie Ann has now works better than I thought it would)!
Are the mob members actually recorded ahead of time as everyone has been saying? How did the guy in the video “know” that he had won $10,000?
Kevin seems right — was everyone in the mob Skype’d ?
Everyone answers the questions far beforehand and is taped on camera doing so. A very small group of people are backstage on camera to give live reactions when needed.
This show has problems:
1. Wrong host on a great show
2. Waiting 10 seconds for an answer reveal doesn’t add to the excitement, it adds to boredom
3. Money tree makes it even more boring, was a bad idea on the network, is worse on the low budget version. Seeing these wannabe actors wrestle with a $5K decision is a joke.
4. I understand the needs and cost effectiveness of the virtual mob, I’m not against it, but yeah, it does take away from the version with a live mob
What is good:
1. The writing is more in the style of the first season
2. The $50K prize is just fine, and even a step up from recent offerings on GSN, but let’s face it, $100K is certainly doable as the top prize is nearly unobtainable as Saget used to point out, “the mob gets smarter”.
3. The show is on the air at all is good, much better than not having it at all, and at least the spirit of the game is still there.
First off, I am not sold on Carie Ann Inaba. She has a tendency to sing-song some of her lines, and it comes off as being forced enthusiasm at best. I’ve not seen enough of Bob Saget, although I’ve had ample opportunity to do so. If GSN could find somebody else for this gig, then let them get another host.
They are trying for the same interaction that was present with a live, in-studio Mob. I suspect that the main reason not to go with the live Mob is that it requires less in the say of set construction.
If you think that the monetary rewards on this show are small, think in terms of the poor Mobsters! On tonight’s show, two contestants failed rather early on. In one case, fifty Mobsters split one thousand dollars. In the other, fifty-five Mobsters split seven hundred-fifty clams. You do the math! Seems like it doesn’t pay to be a member of the Mob, unless the One can get well up the money ladder.
A slight quickening of the pace, especially in the earlier rounds, would not hurt. There’s no real need for seven- to ten-second waits for the reveal in the early stages of the game. Leter on, yes–by then, the stakes, and the suspense, are as high as they’re likely to get. But the early questions seem fairly easy, especially if one is up on his or her pop culture. (You can tell by the small number of Mobsters eliminated on the first question or two!)
The money ladder would be suitable and generous for a daytime game show. If GSN cannot afford a bigger top prize, then so be it.
My biggest problem is with Carrie Ann Inaba. She doesn’t provoke an atmosphere of suspense, and constantly telling the contestant that they need to lock in their answer and that he/she is working their way up to $50,000 is annoying to no end. GSN needs to bring a comedian into hosting this show – preferably get Bob Saget back here. Without a high top prize, the only thing you can fall back on is the host to bring comedy and suspense into the game, and Carrie Ann is far from being able to do that.
While I think the format of the show is strong, there are some issues which I think are hurting “1 vs. 100″…
1. Carrie Ann Inaba — she’s trying up there, and she seems to be a good person, but her performance is clear evidence why she’s never had a solo hosting job until now (when “DWTS” started, many critics thought Inaba would spin off into her own brand). Her delivery seems forced, and she relies on her dancing/choreography background as a fallback too much. I would agree that a seasoned host or comedian would work better in this situation, although I don’t blame GSN for taking a risk on Inaba (DWTS is a hot show, and you strike while the iron is hot).
2. The “virtual mob” — as others have noted, there’s always going to be that lingering doubt that the showrunners are “stacking the deck” and setting up the questions in a certain matter to make sure someone wins big or loses. I would like to see at least five “mobsters” play the game live, on set, with the contestant. — use that as an excuse to have a themed group or C-level celebs play the game.
3. GSN had a golden opportunity to go beyond southern California to search for mob members to play the game, and they blew it. The technology seen on “Paranoia” has improved dramatically, and GSN, with time and effort, could have pulled off a live mob with 100 “mobsters” from all 50 states via Skype, Facebook, XBOX Live, etc. As a game show fan and ex-contestant whose long lived far away from Los Angeles, any show that opens its contestant eligibility beyond the “City of Angels” will pique my interest. Add that to the technological innovations that GSN could have worked with, and you had the potential of a truly national game that could get people talking and promote the “anyone can play” philosophy that helped make Regis WWTBAM a hit.
There are several mobsters from outside LA, but they did have to get to LA for an audition. I completely agree more shows need to look outside LA, but with such a pool of low-intelligence so close, why would they want anyone on their shows that could win?
Before anyone jumps on that last sentence, I’m not saying everyone from LA is low-intelligence, I’m just saying that because of the location, people from around the world with more stars in their eyes than brain cells in their heads are in town and come knocking on game show casting doors.
The last two words of what I just wrote is key–all of us who wish we could be contestants have to realize it is CASTING that is being done. This is why I can pass so many tests for Millionaire and still not get on the show, I’m simply not what they are looking for at that very moment, I just figure one of these days I will be, so I keep trying.
Wayne has hit on a problem with a lot of American game shows–the contestants all look like they came from Central Casting. They all seem to have the same look, they all seem to have the same accent. Maybe if a producer wants to have a contestant with a little more zing, they’ll cast an African-American–but he or she is going to look more like a stereotype than somebody of intelligence and/or skill.
Compare with the UK game shows that can be found on Another Website. The people look like the kind of blokes who might be sitting across the aisle from you on the bus, or the fellow at the next stool at the local pub. And regional accents are all over the place, whether it be Cockney or Scots or Irish or whatever.
There also does not seem to be the ingrained prejudice against older contestants that you find in American game shows. If you watch, say, “The Cube” (always a good recommendation!), you might well see somebody who is approaching retirement age, who tells Phillip Schofield that he or she is “doing it for the over-sxties”.. You’re not going to find that on US shows these days.
Watch “The Cube” or the Final Chases of “The Chase”, and you’ll see what I mean–and why the UK game shows have such an appeal that is missing in our own models.
I agree with the above comments by Wayne and James E. Parten – casting has become a major point of failure in US game shows, and 1 vs. 100 is no exception.
First of all, it seems to me like US game show producers have been hopping on the bandwagon of selecting candidates whom they think would be “interesting” to watch, regardless of the game show context or how skilled the contestant is at the actual game.
For example, virtually every other contestant on US DOND and Minute to Win It has some kind of sob story to tell, for which they stop the game to devote ten minutes to showcasing the story and REALLY hamming it up to cheesy levels. Then they proceed to repeatedly remind us of the same sob story every ten minutes after that, as if we had the memory of a goldfish. I can see they’re trying to make us want to root for the player, but it doesn’t work, and the end result is thoroughly dull. It’s the one thing that makes MtWI strike me as simply decent instead of truly good. Protip for producers: I watch game shows for the game. There’s a reason they’re called game shows, not “feel-good charity shows”. If I wanted to watch a sob story with the melodrama factor cranked up to 11, I’d watch soap operas.
The other variant on this mistake is the kind GSN makes repeatedly, between 1 vs. 100, Catch 21, their previous Big Saturday Night schtick, and all the way back to Whammy! Namely, they select the candidates who are good at trying to act excited and screaming at the top of their lungs. The end result tends to feel like an unauthentic knockoff of The Price Is Right. Notice that TPIR’s contestants don’t always jump up and down and scream, even though they do when they’re genuinely excited. And Jeopardy! works just fine without any yelling at all. Catch 21, on the other hand, always seems to have contestants who sound like they’re trying to play the game while simultaneously trying to pass a kidney stone. I also recall Press Your Luck’s contestants looking genuinely unimpressed when landing on the Flokati Rug or Add-A-One with $0, but Whammy! would see players yell and cheer over hitting stinkingly bad prizes like $300 worth of M&Ms.
Both the GSN and NBC versions of 1 vs. 100 seem to have fallen into this pitfall when casting the Mob, although I thought the NBC version did a better job of having exceptions. On one hand, they frequently had incompetent members who were obviously there just to have a common clique to point out, and they’d usually get eliminated on the first three questions. I also got the impression that they specifically instructed the mob to egg on the One as loudly as possible during every “money or the Mob” decision. But the NBC version also had genuinely strong players in the Mob, like Ken Jennings, Brad Rutter, Annie Duke, and Sister Rose.
In summary: Producers, you’re trying way too hard to increase your ratings through cheap casting gimmicks, and you’re only shooting yourselves in the foot. We want authentic people, not the large hams of future B-movies.
The secondary problem is simply that they tend to only search for contestants who are nearby (usually LA), and in doing so, they’re really shrinking the pool of potential contestants. Remember when Millionaire did auditions over the phone? Personally, I thought the results back then were much better than the syndicated version. The contestants were sharp and knew a lot of trivia, which led to a lot of intense moments on top-tier questions when a contestant was faced with a tough decision over a six-figure question. Of course, searching nationwide won’t help if you have no idea what to look for, so the first problem is still the biggest issue.
And between the two versions of 1 vs. 100, I thought Saget was a much better host – he acted natural and comfortable, and he’d crack jokes and improvise on the fly. Inaba was definitely worth a shot, but she just turned out to be nothing to write home about – not very good, but not particularly bad either. She’s like the game show host equivalent of a C-average student. It feels like she’s just sort of there to play traffic cop for the game, and she may as well be reading from a teleprompter. For that matter, you could probably replace her with a pre-programmed, fully automatic Hatsune Miku hologram and it’d still feel more spontaneous.
All that said, though, I also think 1 vs. 100 is one of the best GSN originals to hit the network in years. It’s got its flaws, but it’s a B+ in a sea of C’s.
Way to go, Poochy EXE!
One one of this series of “The Cube” they had a contestant who had been one of the “first responders” during the 7/7 terrorist attacks that shook up London a few years ago. We did not find out about this until the contestant had a few games under his belt, and once it was brought up, it wasn’t brought up again.
Had this been MTWI, Guy Fieri would have let us know about it right from the git-go. And we would not have head the end of it! We’d have head about it when he first came on, before every game, after every game, after every commercial break, and so on, and so forth. . .
The important thing should be “the game’s the thing”. Too often, it isn’t!!
I can guess why it happened, but the most irritating thing to me is that every other episode is switching back and forth between 2 different money trees. The reason why $100,000 was possible with RR is it was really so rare anyone won the $10,000 anyway. People are leaving with $5 and $10K much more often on 1 vs. 100 so I am OK with the 50 grand, but I would rework it a little bit.
I really like the show, though. Carrie Ann is not horrible as people are making her out to be. At this point the only thing she does that irritates me is remind people that “you’re working your way up to $50K” after every question.
I’ll say this once: If Carrie Ann can’t be able to hold what it takes to be a completely successful game-show host, out the door she goes!
I think the show could be even better if they intergrated this gsn version with Xbox. The 100 mob members could all people who are playing from xbox live and they could be chosen in the same manner to be in the mob as it was chosen back when it really was on xbox. Now with Kinect it could be easier than ever and it could still have live people to play against and it could use the real images from people instead of thier avatars. Also everyone could play at home with the show with the chance of being selected to be in it! This could be a huge perk for xbox as well as the show.