It's February Sweeps Month in the US, which means we get random celebrities popping up everywhere, sitcoms and dramas try major plot twists, and game shows will try twisting formats and adding money. 1 vs 100 tried out a special show, called Last Man Standing, in which 101 players played against each other, no helps allowed. The last man/woman standing wins $250,000.
I have to say, I really enjoyed the change. Part of it is because I hate Endemol's casting crew with an absolute passion. It was nice to have real people as opposed to one-dimensional characters a la Charles Dickens. That concept works for people who enjoy Deal or No Deal, because the game play is so lacking. 1 vs 100 actually has fairly rich game play though, you don't need to have this huge story element for the contestant. We had Annie Duke stand in the position of the one for the length of the show, and I have to concede, she actually did quite well for herself. She reasoned through most of the harder trivia questions quite well, and understood the level of the questions.
Speaking of the questions - I don't know what happened, but they managed to pick up some great writers for the show. The one thing I was really interested in seeing was how the difficulty of the questions would ramp up, and I wasn't disappointed. Here's a sample question of a cleverly-written, mildly difficult question:
Which of these has the most stories?
A. Chrysler Building
B. Transamerica Pyramid
C. Combined Works of Stephen King
I didn't think the question was extrodinarily difficult, knowing how many short stories he wrote was likely more than either of the buildings themselves (turns out he wrote 114 short stories). I will say though, that I really like how it tests two different facets of knowledge. Maybe I'm just a sucker for non-standard questions that still challenge your knowledge, but I really enjoyed the questions tonight.
The end game was a bit rough around the edges. I'm not going to spoil the ending in case you haven't seen it, but I think they could have figured out a way to improve it. It seemed too drawn out, and not in a natural way. I don't think they knew what to do with the winner either, and subsequently rushed it to the next game.
It's a bit disappointing to go back to the regular game after this, knowing what could have been. I'll still watch the show though, as it's a fairly solid format. At the very least, it's a good holdover until Temptations comes around in the fall.