“Our Little Genius” Update: Audience Reports of Questionable Activity

Edit: I just wanted to drive the point home again that, no, I don’t think the show is rigged.  There are clearly shady goings-on or else it wouldn’t have been canned, but it’s not flat out rigged.  Answers weren’t given away.  We’ve been reporting on alleged stuff others have stated, and adding some thoughts.

The situation on Fox’s now-canceled quiz show Our Little Genius is pretty bad.  It would have been larger news if the NBC late night ordeal wasn’t happening at the same time.  To bring people up to speed if you are behind: Fox pulled Our Little Genius less than a week before its debut because there was an, “issue with how some information was relayed to contestants during…pre-production,” according to executive producer Mark Burnett.  Some audience reports from Hollywood Junket are shedding some more light on this.

We briefly discussed this first issue.  The child contestants were guaranteed $10,000.  It takes three questions to reach the $10,000 milestone.  If a kid doesn’t reach that point and loses earlier, they stopped tape and brought back the contestant to restart the game.  It’s a bit shady and dumb, but so many shows have done it that I’m not calling shenanigans on this part.  Million Dollar Password had a similar rule originally where contestants would get two shots going for the first milestone of $25,000.  A lot of shows pick and choose the episodes to air and shelve others because they are deemed not exciting, so stuff like this happens.  It sucks and it shouldn’t, but it does.

This one is, again, a report HollywoodJunket.com.  The category of a question is given to the kid before the decision to stop with the money or play the question is stated by the parents.  In one game attended by the entertainment website, the category was given and the kid said he didn’t know it. At this point taping was stopped for a few minutes.  After this, the game began again and a new category was given.  The kid knew this category well and the game proceeded.  Someone from the show afterwards, to brush the situation off, said it was a “technical error” and the categories were “mixed up by mistake”.

So we’ve got this and we’ve got the alleged preproduction issues reported by the New York Times where information about the topics in the game were given out to the contestants in some way, and the two probably sync up somewhere along the line.  If all this alleged information true it’s just about as bad as you can get without giving the kids the answers on a piece of paper beforehand.  I’ll repeat again: it’s not that hard to make a game show.  Mark Burnett is a fantastic reality producer; one of the best.  But we’re trying to shove the reality-mentality of the picture perfect show where every moment is produced to the point of being scripted.  It can’t happen.  More information will be coming in during the next few days, so stay posted.