Million Dollar Password

I’m on vacation so hopefully these automatic posts work. It’s always a gamble. Here’s a quick little place you can throw your opinions about Million Dollar Password which debuts tonight at 8:00PM ET on CBS.

Network: CBS
Airings: Sundays at 8:00PM ET
Host(s): Regis Philbin
Vote for how many stars you think the show deserves to the right, and then leave a comment!

Million Dollar Password is a revamp of the classic word game format. In the new version’s elimination round, two contestants play four rounds of 30 second guessing games, with five passwords to get per round. The players switch celebrities at round three. Most points at the end of round four plays for $1,000,000 in the money round. Here, the contestant and celebrity with who he or she played the best in the main game must get five words out of a certain amount in order to move up the money chain. After winning $25,000; the player can’t leave with less than that. After six successful rounds, the player wins $1,000,000. Not completing a goal in any round loses money won up to that point and the player leaves with the last milestone.

I get to be the person who few agree with as usual: I’m just not a big fan. I can stand the game play if necessary but even then I have issues. We get more gameplay out of the first few minutes than we do in the money round, the round they are actually trying to promote more. It’s the issue I had with Friend or Foe?. They answered more questions in that last 60 seconds than they do in the rest of the game. On Password it’s basically the reverse of that: more game play in the first five minutes of a game than the actual portion they promote. And I still don’t think the money round format works. This comes from me, again, just not thinking Password works for a million dollar format, at least in the format we have here which is essentially Pyramid without the giant pyramid.

My main issue with the show is the presentation. The set’s nice and fine, but the rest is just not working. The constant applause after each word is distracting and throws off the vibe of what they are wanting to make: a tense word game. And that’s not working either. I’m feeling no tension or connection, I’m just watching. The music is bland background noise like I’d expect from Chain Reaction. I feel like I’m watching Sony’s Pyramid, to be quite honest. The never ending whooshes and sound effects get old very quickly as well. Again, just like Pyramid. Regis almost seems out of his game here. He gets no chance to connect with contestants which is what he was good at. Donny Osmond from Pyramid would have been just as good and probably cheaper. But they seemed to advertise the show on the fact that it had Regis which was a troubling sign to me from the start. No, this is far from a bastardization of a format like Fremantle did with Temptation. And who knows, maybe this will lead to a syndicated series eventually which is where this show works. However, it’s not working as a dramatic format, the presentation is just too much, and it needs more even pacing.

[rating: 3.5/5]