They like to call their new series Estate Of Panic and Cha$e, but we know better...Note to the Estate production staff: when you're using the same music as your original, it makes the connection all that much easier to make -- and given that I saw the direct ancestry line within twelve seconds, making it easier is a real achievement. Honestly, you've got them doing gross, disgusting, scary, and painful stuff in order to win money: the only new elements are keeping it in a single location (more or less -- it wouldn't surprise me to learn we're looking at roughly five soundstages), ramping up the creepiness factor of the host, and giving us a pool of seven contestants to barely know. When I saw the banner on our own site, I thought this would be a multi-week competition between one group of people: now I know we're getting a new selection every time this thing goes on the air. And so it will continue until you come up with the brilliant idea of a couples competition. Again.
Admittedly, it's not horrible. If you liked Fear Factor, you'll probably enjoy Estate. The dual elimination element (don't be the last in a room, don't scavenge the least money from it) may need some fine-tuning, no one's looking forward to that first trip into the kitchen, and there may be only so much they can do with the house environment. (It's not as if the helicopters will be showing up early.) But it's a straight-up game show with horror elements, and that's all it's going to stay. Sound familiar?
Cha$e has some potential problems. For the editing, we start with the size of the contestant pool: with ten people going after the cash every week, we don't have time to get to know everyone -- or anyone. (The first winner produced a very sincere reaction of 'who': compared to some of the others, he'd barely had screen time.) And for the contestants themselves, they have to buy into the silly premise of being in a live-action video game where the props only work for as long as those chasing them will pretend they will -- with a true risk factor roughly equivalent to touch football.
On the other hand, people buy into American Gladiators... and at least for the premiere, some of the contestants were willing to be genuinely nervous about the hunters. (The costume design helps, even if the hunter names don't: being followed by the Men In Black is seldom a weak element.)
In a way, it's like watching a very active Survivor challenge over the course of an hour: come together, move apart, go in different directions, have the rules force you to temporarily align, face a new twist popping up every ten minutes or so. Some elements need work -- twists can feel too arbitrary, hosts who only appear on screens are an automatic weakness, and the bonus money flags are too hard to spot on that large a field -- but this could work. It just needs a tuneup or two before giving it the extended release from the shop.
But in the end, both new entries are just what most reality competition shows work out to be: glorified game shows with extra special effects and a relatively small prize pool. No more and no less.
Well, the electric shocks are at least a small added bonus.
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