LAST EDITED ON 12-20-11 AT 07:41 AM (EST)And after the premiere, that should be Who Can Still Stand To Watch This Show? Meet the latest in NBC's never-ending attempts to not give away a million dollars, where the four-day marathon is burning off the whole thing in a single dead-zone shot, the commercials give away every event, the world's worst Santa Claus narrates everything that happened three seconds ago because no one in the viewing audience is presumed smart enough to count, and Ben Bailey does fatal damage to his career.
Actually, he's the only thing tolerable about the show. But when you dive face-first into sewage, you're going to pick up some of the smell.
If you missed it (and lucky you! You didn't see the computer-generated elf!), it's a hybrid of Russian Roulette and 1 vs. 100, with the later taking place one at a time. One person stands in the center of the arena, with ten others around him. The one person is playing for a million dollars (and no one will ever do it). You get there (or not) by choosing the ten people one at a time to have trivia duels with. Questions alternate back and forth, starting with the challenged party, with twenty seconds to answer each. Miss one and you drop through the floor. If the center player knocks out all ten, that's the million. Each single person eliminated by the center player is worth a random amount of cash from 1k to 20k. After five eliminations, they get the option to walk and keep that amount. Drop and it's nothing.
If one of the circle of ten wins a duel, they get a straight 10k and presumably it's End Of Game: next contestant. (How do you move into the center? Apparently for now, you don't.) At that point, there's a lightning round with ten seconds allotted per answer, held between all remaining circle players and building a mini-jackpot at 1k per correct answer. Last one standing gets that money, end of episode.
Are there any helps here? Minor ones. You're shown the length of the answer in letters with one to four filled in, and the center player gets two passes: if they're stuck, they can throw the question to the challenged and force them to answer it. (Reach the halfway point and you get one more.) And that's it --
-- except that Santa is narrating. Badly. And constantly recapping what just happened. And there's a horrible-looking computer-generated elf. Plus they've surrounded the one ordinary player with a bunch of PhD candidates. And no one will ever win the million, by design. They stole graphics from Ton Of Money, too. And then there's the Christmas lights on the logo...
Ben Bailey needs someone to drive a cab onto the set. And then run over the producers with it. Slowly. Back and forth. Using snow tires.
Free Ben!
NBC: We're A Lost Cause And We Don't Care.
Y'know the best thing about having Fear Factor back? They generally presume you can remember what happened during the last stunt.
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