An Interview With “Million Dollar Mind Game” Producers Alex Reznik and Jonathan Barry

ABC’s fantastic game show Million Dollar Mind Game, airing Sundays at 4:00PM ET/2:00PM PT, has two weeks weeks left before the season finale on November 27th.  It’s had an uphill battle from the start.  The show has its fans, though, and it’s gaining a following.  We’re big fans and want to see it continue any way we can.  It’s why you see us talking about it so much and why we’re posting logic puzzles resembling the show on our Facebook page.  Someone may as well promote it.  We don’t see shows like this often.  I recently got the chance to talk to producers Alex Reznik and Jonathan Barry.  We talked about the process of getting the show to work in America, the infamous $600,000 loss from the video gamers, and the reaction to the scheduling.

For reference, I am AD, Alex Reznik is AR, and Jonathan Berry is JB.  Questions or group conversation is bolded.

AD: How long have you been working on getting Million Dollar Mind Game on the air?

AR: I got the rights at the end of 2008 and then I teamed up with Jonathan, and we’ve had it since then.  summer of 2009, right, Jonathan?

JB: Yeah, it was Summer 2009 that Alex (Reznik) brought me the project.  I took a look at it and tried to develop it out for the American audience and then we took it out and pitched it.  We landed it at Merv Griffin.  Then it was another period of time before we were able to sell it.  We took it to Steve McPherson at ABC who completely got it and basically bought it in the room.  It was all fine from then on.

AD: What attracted you to the format so much?

AR: I’ve seen the Russian format.  I kind of grew up on this format.  I was just amazed that there’s nothing like this on American television, where people get to solve logic puzzles.  The questions…I think the questions are…we always say the questions are the star of the show.  Without good questions there is no show.  And Jonathan is the instrument of providing that

JB: I have much more a background in game.  I did shows like Win Ben Stein’s Money, Who Wants to be a Millionaire, Whose Line is it Anyway…a lot of shows like that.  What first attracted me to it was the style of questions that did not test whether you were exposed to information and able to retain it, otherwise know as trivia, but really tested people on how they think…putting people in a group setting and letting them work out problems.  And, obviously, the challenge of writing these questions was really interesting from the start.  It’s such a different dynamic than writing trivia questions.  It really was the dynamic at the table.

For me it was all about an interesting question that six people at a table could figure out or attempt to figure out, and, depending on how they approached the question, whether they were able to arrive at the answer.  For me the most interesting thing about it is when you add the stress level of the game and all the other elements…the lights, the time, the studio…that it actually affects the cognitive process so much that you could have a question that six geniuses at a table can’t figure out but a seven year old at home could see through it and figure it out immediately.

An example of that was the Harry Potter question, which is a classic inductive-style question where you have to take a big picture approach instead of looking at it through details.  When you have six people sitting at a table who are detailed oriented they’ll pick it apart and look for number variations and all these very detailed things and they’ll get lost.  At the end of the day a question like that is solved when you take a step back from it and you say, “What happens at 3:45 in the afternoon?”  Kids get out of school.  That, to me, is a wonderful style of question which is why we try to mix up deductive and inductive questions.  But it was fun because it was never done on America television before.  We never tested someone’s ability to think and collaborate on answers rather than just trivia.

AR: That was our pitch, our slogan: “It’s not what you know.  It’s how you think”

AD: To go back to what you said, why do you think nothing like this has been tried before?  It seems like a no-brainer to do a show where people just try to solve riddles and puzzles.

JB: I tend to think of it this way: game shows tend to fall into two types of categories in terms of question and answer.  There are shows like Deal or No Deal but that’s another genre all together.  But Q&A gameshows basically rely on one of two things to drive viewership: play-along like Jeopardy! or Wheel [of Fortune] or Who Wants to be a Millionaire, or spectacle like, “Let’s see someone who’s prominent in their field like Mastermind or Our Little Genius.”  Those are more spectacle.  The viewer isn’t really playing along because the average viewer really can’t.  I think this show…in Russia it’s presented as a spectacle and because it’s been on the air so long people have been trained to play along at home.  But the truth of the matter is it is a spectacle.

Unfortunately, spectacle is not conducive to American trivia shows as much as play along is, which is why there was a push to turn the format to have.  Instead of having experts play like the Russians have and we’re just amazed that they are able to arrive at these questions that viewers send in from all across the country…we are flipping it.  We are actually turning those contestants into real contestants and awarding them money which the Russian version does not do.  They reward the viewer.  Even though those six people do have competition it’s really about the home audience stumping them.

One of the reasons the show had a little trouble getting on the air is the decision to either make it a spectacle and therefore have a little less viewer involvement, or do you go, “We have six people from Iowa all playing together,” which then demands that you write the questions differently and make them a little more base level, a little more acceptable for the audience and make it a play along.  I think that’s a sort of trap this show gets in to.  The truth of the matter is at the end of the day it is spectacle for most viewers.  There’s a very small segment of the population that’s going to be able to sit and play along all the time.  We love the fact that we’re seeing so many wonderful comments from people that do play along and that they do exist and there is room for a smart show.

AD: Obviously I’m a big fan of the show, and I liked the Russian version from what I saw.  However, admittedly, there was initial fear about how such a smart show would translate in America where this type of things typically doesn’t do that well anymore.  Did you have similar fears?

AR: I think it was all about making it relatable, as Jonathan said, to the people in Iowa so they don’t feel alienated and think, “Oh, god, this is too smart for me.”  To me it was more about how to make it relatable for the American audience and keeping some elements of the current Russian format which has been on the air for over 35 years and changed from every angle.  We had to take those elements from the Russian format and how to fit that in to our reliability and the people in the US can understand and follow.

JB: When I first started working on the questions I knew immediately, having gone over the Russian questions and looked over them and studied them and look at how they were constructed and the different styles used, I knew there were going to be several challenges in writing these questions.  The first challenge is because in Russia they aren’t awarding money to the players, the questions don’t have to be pinned…they can be much more open ended which leaves a lot more room for discussion.  In America, because of standards and practices, there has to be only one true answer to each question so each question has to contain a pin.  There has to be a verifiable piece of information that makes it the answer and the only answer.  The challenge of writing a question like that and not making it trivia was a pretty big one that I think we did a pretty good job overcoming.

The other thing is, in Americanizing it, because we were going for a direction that wasn’t spectacle so that a viewer could play along with, the content of the questions had to be much more accessible.  We had to ask questions about things everyone knows.  Everyone knows Harry Potter.  Everyone knows bridges.  Whereas the Russian questions really did require a lot more knowledge of Pushkin and Russian history, and we were not able to go nearly as deep with that.  We basically had to write what I call “real life lateral thinking puzzles”.  The challenge was always to keep those questions at a level that if the entire family was in the room the ten year old would have just as much a chance of answering the question as anyone else.  That was what was really on my mind as I was writing the questions and guiding the writing team.  They had to be accessible and they had to be pinned just for legal reasons.

We were always very concerned with how to Americanize it for the American audience.  The term that goes around the business is “Dumbing down,” and I take issue with that.  It’s not about dumbing it down but making it more accessible.  I can create a wonderful question about Doctor Fahrenheit and Doctor Celsius but it would be such an esoteric question…and I did write a question about that…but it becomes so esoteric that no one cares.  But if you put Harry Potter in the question everyone goes, “Oh, I know Harry Potter.  I can relate to that.”  That was one of the biggest challenges in writing the questions.

AR: And in terms of the game play the Russians really rely on the element of it being live which is why it’s been on for 35 years.  The play along from the viewers at home…that is a crucial element that I hope we can eventually get to on our show, that people can submit their own questions mixed with ours.  That viewer/TV relationship is crucial especially in today’s technological world.

AD: Yeah that was one thing I heard a lot about when the show first came out…where’s the question submission element.  But you can’t really do that on a new series like this, can you?

JB: No, you can’t rely on viewers on a show that has not been on the air yet to send in questions.  You have to find a writing staff that gets this, which in it of itself was a massive challenge because trivia writers generally don’t make good riddle writers.  In my experience in consulting with the show in other regions…what I found is the people that were the strongest writers of the questions were people who had a background in poetry.  People who were able to play with words and paint pictures.  The poets were the most interesting writers, not the trivia writers.  The trivia writers are used to just saying, “Who was the 13th pope,” and that sort of thing.  When you can get someone with a little bit of poetry then you can play with words and move the discussion in various ways.

AR: The reasons the Russian viewers can send questions in is because they’re all from every day life.  Take the Harry Potter question.  It happened.  It’s a story that the marketers of Harry Potter decided to do to get their campaign.  Or the GPS question we have, with the left turns.  These type of questions…they’re from every day life.

JB: Those were always my favorite questions.  The ones you could say, “UPS had a problem.  This is the problem.  This is what ended up happening.  What was the solution that affected that change.”  Really going into history and seeing these stories.  Of course finding that you need a wonderful team of researchers to find these pieces of information and stories out there.

AD: The most remarkable thing about the show is the look.  Look at other shows like…well as good as Deal or No Deal did for the genre in terms of getting stuff on the air, we’re now just inundated with shows with people that scream at the top of their lungs and look the same.  This show is vastly different.  How did you come to figure out the look and feel?

JB: Truthfully, we looked at the Russian version.  We looked at the intimate setting of the table and the locale  Alex can speak more to this but we really went to the Russians and made it true to what they did.  It was all about what happened at the table and the intimate discussions at the table and the drama.  To be able to catch that is just as important as catching any game play.

AR: I think, Alex, you said it…that ABC liked the fact that it’s not like Deal or No Deal.  We’re not going to have people jumping up and down like it’s a circus.  It’s what separates us from those other shows.  We were always concerned if people could find it to be too stand-offish in a way.  The comments that we’ve heard so far are refreshing.  People find it to be different and interesting and bringing a style of intelligence back to television.

JB: It’s a much more intense show in that regard with its intimacy.  ABC was very aware that that was needed.  This level of intimacy was something we could not lose.  Putting it in front of a huge studio audience would have lost that.  Putting it in front of all the Vari-Lites would have lost that.  It would have changed and diluted what the show is about.  They were spot on with the setting.  We went in a very different style…it looks like a place.  Millionaire doesn’t look like a place.  Deal or No Deal doesn’t look like a place.  This looks like a place.  It looks like out of James Bond…like the Monte Carlo casino and the private room in the back.  That’s what we were going for and I think ABC was very smart in staying true to that aspect of it.

AD: As you said before, it’s very different from generic trivia questions.  People aren’t used to this stuff as opposed to regular questions.  Was it tough finding contestants who could handle it?

JB: Finding contestants is always a very tough thing.  In Russia they spend a lot of time casting each role at the table.  They don’t just put people there.  They really look at their personality types, the way they think, the way they approach problem solving.  They go at is scientifically.  While we did do a little of it, the truth of the matter is these are people that came in preassembled and to find that right team with the right dynamic that has the intelligence to do a show like this and that has the personality to come through on TV…it definitely was a challenge.  I think the casting was fantastic.  We were watching the video gamers.  They were the first team we taped

AD: Really?

JB: Yeah they were the first team up.  First stack of questions.

AR: We got lucky

JB: We got lucky but we also did a good job matching the level of material to the players.  You could bring in six Mensas and they may have just ran the table and made everything look easy.  It’s what Millionaire goes through…is this going to be too hard, too easy, are we going to give away the million dollars, are we not…?  But it ended up working out well.  There were some teams that never got to air that we did try playing and…one team I remember was a family from Orange County and they were not able to even understand the questions.  They couldn’t get their head around the style of questions.  But there was only one team with that issue.  The rest did a fantastic job.

AD: We saw that with the video gamers, especially.  They’re going to be hard to forget.

AR: Remember, we did make them cry.

All: *laugh*

AR: We made them cry

AD: Is there a sense of pride as producers to create a show this intense that, even before the final moments, you’re making people break down and cry?

JB: I don’t think it’s about making someone cry but being able to heighten the emotional level.  At the end of the day people watch television for the relationships.  They want to see the people interact…people presented with challenges that heighten their emotions.  Whenever you can get that from contestants and have it be so genuine there’s always a moment of pride.  That’s one thing I adore about this show.  The combination of the stress at the table and the cognitive demand these questions place on you…it’s a very rough and stressful experience.  Sitting at that table for 45 minutes and playing a game…it feels like a 12 hour marathon.  It’s excruciating.  It’s fun to be able to pull those emotions out of people whether it’s stress or crying or elated.  That roller coaster is what we wanted.  We’re really proud we got it.

AR: You said it, Alex.  This team, the video game geeks…they are our dream scenario.  They are all smart and different.  It’s like what the Russian teams are.  They’re different and relatable.  You want to watch them.  To me they are my favorite team so far.  They have a different dynamic than opposed to…not to say the teachers don’t have their own dynamic…

JB: You’re always rooting for them.

AR: You’re always rooting for them.  What’s interesting is the key is finding people who are enjoying playing.  You’ve seen that with the teachers and the geeks.  We brought the geeks in several times in the audition process.

JB: There was a moment when we were taping them when one [video gamer] was very, very stressed and crying.  I’m not sure whether the line made it into the show or not, but he looked up from this moment of pure stress and with so many mixed emotions and goes, “This is the best game ever.”  That was the moment that made everyone in the studio proud.

AD: Was it easy to tell when a team walked onto the stage and were underprepared?  Could you just figure, “They aren’t going anywhere.”

AR: Oh yeah.  Some people surprised us.  Some people who we thought were going to be superb just went down.  It’s the beauty of the show that the Russians always talk about.

JB: There’s the military team that came after the video gamers.  They were very impressive.  I expected them to be good, but they were really good.  Really phenomenal…how they worked together, how they communicated, how they thought and approached questions.  So many of these questions, when you get to the nitty gritty of each question…one may be pure deductive reasoning and the deductive reasoners will have no problem.  Then you bring an inductive question and the deductive reasoners are lost.  They don’t know how to get into it.  The military really did well.

Look at the gamers.  They did extremely well with the deductive questions.  If you remember the questions they had problems with was the Harry Potter question, pure inductive questions…the astronaut questions about the suit being too restrictive.  All you have to do is ask yourself how an amateur golfer can hit a ball 200 yards with one hand.  That’s something an inductive reasoner would have an easier time with.  It was fun seeing each person think in their own way.

AD: You said the video gamers were the first taped team.  Did you have a panic attack when it looked like they were going all the way out of the gate?

JB: I remember when we first went in to tape this first episode.  As I was walking in to the studio, to the judges table, the casting guy walked up to me and said, “OK, Jonathan. I can tell you that the first contestants that we’re having are all gamers and all members of Mensa.”

AD: Oh god.

JB: I just said, “We’re giving away the million dollars.”  The programming executive from ABC was standing right there when I blurted that out so there was a little panic that ensued.  But by the time we got to the 10th question everyone wanted them to win.  Everyone was rooting for them.  I remember when we took a break half way through and they just plowed through the first half.  I walked out the door and everyone said, “So, Jonathan, you’re giving away the million dollars huh?”

All: Laugh

JB: There’s always that moment of panic.  The truth of the matter is whether we give away the million dollars or not as long as we make good television that’s all that matters.

AD: I asked because I remember when I used to do stuff with GSN.  On one show which really didn’t have much of a budget they gave a $100,000 prize on the first day of taping.  The odds were hugely stacked against people.  I remember the panic attack of, “What are we going to do?”

JB: It also goes back to my experience on Millionaire…when we first brought Millionaire to the states.  Michael Davies was really concerned about giving away the million dollars, and, “Oh god we’re just going to give it away.”  Lo and behold, four or five months later people are going, “You know, we really need to see a million dollar winner.  We haven’t yet.”  Obviously, the people in charge of the money are a bit more concerned about that.

AR: Again I think it goes into the unpredictability of this game.  You never know what questions you’re going to get.  You may think, “This is going to be easy.  They’ll get this.”  And they’re stumped.  You can never predict.

AD: You know I have to ask these next few questions given what’s going on with the show.  Sorry.  First, how long ago did you tape the show?

JB: A year ago

AD: So it’s been a while.  Did you think it would air this summer?

JB: We thought it was going to air last Fall when Skating with the Stars was on.

AD: The Sunday at 4PM thing came as a shock to everyone.  I don’t think anyone has heard of that happening before.  As producers, what goes through your mind when you hear that?

JB: I think the eternal optimist who has the glass half full would say, “Hey, we’re getting on the air.”  But that’s not who I am.

All: Laugh

JB: Obviously, of course if anyone in my position were to say, “We’re very happy about the time slot and it works fine for us,” I don’t think they’d be telling you the truth.  We want to see the show where it belongs…in primetime, evenings, a lot more special.  But, you know, you never really know what’s going inside those programming meetings at the network.  They have access to the research and the numbers…the research and who the demographics are.  They are in-the-know.  You can question it all the time but that’s where they put it.  It’s a little upsetting.  I’d rather see it where a lot of people have access to it.

AR: As the optimist, being put in the time slot we are…the buzz has been very positive so far and we just need to spread the word out to as many people as possible so they can see it.  I think we can change some minds at the network hopefully.

AD: If nothing else, at this time you’re not really going to get the casual people flipping around.  If people are watching it’s because they genuinely want to see the show.  You get a good core group of fans built up.

JB: We always knew this kind of show, for an American audience, would be a niche show.  It was going to have a small group that it really appealed to.  But it would be a very strong core who loves the show.  We always knew this was going to happen.  Whether it fits in with the ABC audience that watches Dancing With the Stars and the shows they have on…appealing to that same group or demo was something we never expected to happen.  We knew this was going to be a show where there was a core group of viewers that really like it.

AD: So what are the prospects of it popping up somewhere else if you get the audience you’re hoping for?

AR: We just have to continue to build.  There’s no campaign whatsoever.  I think we just need word of mouth and people who are watching to keep spreading the word and tuning in.  If we have the chance to give an argument or present something to the network saying, “Look, here’s a base,” and see what we can do.  If not there, maybe someone else.

JB: We’d love to find a home for it but it depends on how it performs and the response for this run we’re having now.

AR: I don’t think they’re expecting us to draw huge number given our time slot.  If we can generate at least good numbers and relatively decent enough numbers and build we give ourselves a shot and we can go from there.