So one biggish international story this week was that British channel ITV has made a show that’s almost painfully close to the horrible economic situation we’re in right now: The Colour of Money.  In the show, you basically have to take money out from a random cash machine and hope there’s enough in there to cover your withdrawal.  Sounds oddly familiar to what a lot of people are going through right now.

To be more specific with the rules, twenty cash machines are presented, each has a different dollar amount attached to it that you don’t know.  A contestant picks a cash machine and takes some money out.  If the machine has enough to cover it, the player gets the money.  If they overdraw, they get nothing for that pick.  If you meet your cash target after a set amount of picks (10?) you win your money.  If you don’t, you lose.  

Does this sound horribly boring and dumb to anyone else but me?  We made fun of How Much is Enough? a lot, and deservedly so.  But this seems to at least take the one redeemable quality: competition.  Colour of Money is just guessing a dollar value and hoping.  Yes, there is a vague amount of math which can be done to help out like in any other game of straight odds, but it’s so obtuse that I couldn’t give a crap.  Cross your fingers we don’t get the format over here.  But looking how NBC is doing right now, I’d look for announcement in December.