Set Report from “The $1,000,000 Pyramid”

CBS recently shot a pilot for their new daytime game show The $1,000,000 Pyramid, an update of the classic 80s game show The $100,000 Pyramid.  Again, like most news-worthy things, it happened while I was on vacation.  Many of you may already know about it but for those that don’t, you’ll be very happy to know the show was updated perfectly from the old version to today.”  Thanks to audience member Mitch J. for the info and pictures.  This entire pilot and potential show is just validating my point that Embassy Row is the only production company I place all my trust in to make a good, exciting, fun game show anymore.

The game is exactly like the old version.  Two teams of a contestant and a celebrity pick one of six categories.  Your celebrity partner has to try to describe up to seven items in that category to you in 30 seconds.  After three rounds of this, the most points goes to the Winner’s Circle.  There one member of the team must list things in a category.  Each correct guess from the other team member earns money, and going all the way to the top of the Pyramid earns the game’s top prize.  In the current version, the first win of the Pyramid earns $25,000 and the second time is $50,000.

Tim Vincent was the host for one of the days of pilot shooting .  He was also the pilot host of GSN’s old game show Chain Reaction and he recently guest hosted a week of Who Wants to be a Millionaire.  He’s not that bad but I’d be stunned if he went further than this.  The other host was actor Dean Cain who doesn’t seem to be doing much of anything recently.  I’ve got no personal opinion since I haven’t seen either, but Mitch said about Tim, “Did a capable job… relied on prompter a lot; chalk it up to being day one. His British accent caused a couple of pick-ups to be done, a couple in particular included when a category was Mamma Mia (he said Ma-Ma Mia, and the other with a description of a category being homophones (he would say Homo-phones and picked it up as ha-ma-phones).”

I’m pretty happy the core of the show stayed the same this time around.  The last Pyramid revival a few years back, done by Sony Pictures, had the production team do everything they humanly could to change the format in some way.  It never worked so they took it back to essentially the old format.  It’s nice to see there’s no messing around here and it goes straight for the old style.  There’s a “League of Champions” to play for the $1,000,000.  That wasn’t really touched upon.

As you can see by the set picture, they went with the old looking set updated a bit for modern times.  I’m sorry but I have to laugh a bit at some people who wet themselves over the fact they are using trilons, or those flip boxes, instead of monitors.  The trilons have to be cheaper to just slap on the one-time-only pilot than buying, mounting, and wiring about 15 monitors, which will be used for the long-run in the actual series.  It’s just simple economics and budgeting, as well as the pilot process.  Just another case of, “It’s 2009, welcome to new technology!”  Just expect the current trilons on the set to convert to monitors by the time the series pulls around.  Go cheap for now and plan for the long-run later.

Everything seems fantastic about this.  From what I’m hearing from insiders, I wouldn’t be shocked to see The $1,000,000 Pyramid be picked up for a daytime run, but stay tuned to news.  The show would have to debut in a few months when CBS’s Guiding Light burns out, so the Pyramid may be back on television once again very shortly.