Weekend Replay on a Weekday: “Succes Verzekerd”

In my continued quest to show you some great (or horrible) games from abroad, I really have been looking to the Netherlands.  It seems to be about the only country coming up with decent original ideas which is yet another of the dozens of reasons to love them.  They’ve had a show going on on their network RTL recently called Succes Verzekerd.  The easiest way to describe it is a single player edition of ABC’s short-lived quiz show Duel on the Million Dollar Password set.

One player gets seven categories and a million euro.  The contestant chooses one of the categories, and the first question has three answers.  The player has to place all of his or her bank on the answer he or she thinks it is and lock it in.  Three times during the show the player can split up the money in any way they want among the different choices.  Also once the player can give back half of the remaining bank to automatically get the question right.  A right answer means you keep whatever money is on the correct answer and play on.  A wrong answer means you leave with nothing.  The player has to choose one of the remaining categories to answer.  Each new question has one more choice, so question two has four choices, question three has five choices, and so on to question seven having nine choices.  Whatever money the player holds on to after all seven questions have been correctly answered is what the player leaves with.

So really they found a way to fix every country’s money-handling situation with Duel, which was one of its many problems, but it’s just really not as exciting.  You can’t help but feel the Who Wants to be a Millionaire ripoff vibe coming from it.  Even the host is from the Dutch version of Millionaire.  Also, just look at that set.  It’s identical to Million Dollar Password.  Succes Verzekerd isn’t a bad show at all.  It’s a lot better than a ton of the crap we throw around this country, game show wise.  But it’s just not memorable or terribly exciting.