Deal Or No Deal

[Robert Hutchinson]

I kinda sorta forgot it was on. My bad.

[tvwxman]

The good : It's a suspenseful (non-)game. Loved the sleek set, and Howie is, in a word, perfect. Give him time, and his ability to be evil in his temptations will really come out.

Love the way the banker is set up.

The bad : Sorry, but I miss the days where a player had to earn the right to play a game and win big money. The Aussie version has the audience play a trivia game. The Dutch vers is tied into their lottery, and has the final players play a game to earn the right to play. Just announcing a contestant to enter doesn't do it for me. It reeks of 'casting' and not 'contesting'.

And, for that matter, whereas I like models, and really like 26 hot ones, they serve no purpose. Have 25 losing contestants up there, and let them play for a bit of cash like the Aussie show.

The pacing is off. It's too fast when it comes to opening the briefcases, and too slow everywhere else. For some reason, I didn't see a lot of 'psychology' in the game. Hell, the last 2 banker offers were pure 'mean amounts' of what was left. There was no psychology there at all. Set up the player vs the banker better...but show less obnoxious family members dancing , and more player sweating out the details.

All in all, a great show that , I predict, will go past 5 days, if for no other reason than the fact that NBC has nothing else to hang it's hat on.

And someone tell me why ABC passed on this AFTER shooting it's own version? Damn you Desperate Housewifes!

[nbcburbank]

Who Wants to Be a Millionaire is a game with a simple concept. Just when you didn't think it could get any simpler Deal or No Deal comes along. The Banker in the booth is a nice touch. This a game that is executed nicely. Exactly how does the home game work? I picked case 17 during the 1st break. Did that make me eligible to win the $10,000 Prize or did I need to pick the case the contestant had next to her? I'm a little confused as to the exact rules.

[SRIV94]

[quote name=\'Brandon Brooks\' date=\'Dec 19 2005, 08:08 PM\']Whatever... I like DoND.  I was actually into it, and I didn't think I would be.

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I enjoyed it as well.

Although, here's what I find troublesome. . .

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You invest 50some minutes watching the game.  The climax comes (either in the final reveal or the contestant taking the deal), and all of a sudden you realize that you don't want to go through the exercise again.  It's a similar problem that I had with GREED--I happened to watch as Dan Avila and his mates climbed the tower (during the initial run on Fox) and found that after the climax, as exciting as it was, I felt kind of let down as I watched the next team play, starting from scratch (not that anything could be done about that, of course).

Point being--this would probably play better if one contestant played for the entire hour instead of bringing on a second contestant to hurriedly rush through the opening of his game.

BTW, where did this show tape?

Doug -- and the countdown to 1700 continues

[SplitSecond]

[quote name=\'TeppanYaki\' date=\'Dec 19 2005, 07:06 PM\']Good editing, as well;
[/quote]
Anything but.  Some awfully strange choices of cutaways to cover up edits, and the ADR (lines that Howie re-recorded after the tape date) was extremely obvious.  Never mind that, but there were several occasions where Howie was being cut up mid-sentence.  It's a practice we've come to tolerate on reality shows, but there's no place for it in a studio-based game show.
[quote name=\'TeppanYaki\' date=\'Dec 19 2005, 07:06 PM\']wonder if/how Avid can sync TEN cameras to multi-edit.
[/quote]
It's a matter of setting up additional banks (4 or 9 cams each) to accommodate all your sources (however many cameras you have, plus the line cut).  You can only look at one bank at any given time, but you can switch banks in order to access all your footage and drop it into the timeline.

I don't personally know whether Deal or No Deal was running ISOs (isolated tapes) on all cameras, or just doing a line cut in addition to running ISOs on a handful of the cameras.  The latter is how the  recent version of Hollywood Squares, for one, handled post production.

[calliaume]

[quote name=\'Robert Hutchinson\' date=\'Dec 19 2005, 09:20 PM\']I kinda sorta forgot it was on. My bad.

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Same with me.  We never get my son to sleep until 7:45 (central) anyway, so I would have missed most of it in any case.  The last minute or so looked good.

[ChrisLambert!]

I'll be interested to see how many of you are sick of the show by Friday night. It's all sizzle and no steak, and while the sizzle is among the best I've witnessed, I'm still hungry.

[NickS]

[quote name=\'SplitSecond\' date=\'Dec 19 2005, 09:55 PM\'][quote name=\'TeppanYaki\' date=\'Dec 19 2005, 07:06 PM\']Good editing, as well;
[/quote]
Anything but.  Some awfully strange choices of cutaways to cover up edits, and the ADR (lines that Howie re-recorded after the tape date) was extremely obvious.  Never mind that, but there were several occasions where Howie was being cut up mid-sentence.  It's a practice we've come to tolerate on reality shows, but there's no place for it in a studio-based game show.
[quote name=\'TeppanYaki\' date=\'Dec 19 2005, 07:06 PM\']wonder if/how Avid can sync TEN cameras to multi-edit.
[/quote]
It's a matter of setting up additional banks (4 or 9 cams each) to accommodate all your sources (however many cameras you have, plus the line cut).  You can only look at one bank at any given time, but you can switch banks in order to access all your footage and drop it into the timeline.

I don't personally know whether Deal or No Deal was running ISOs (isolated tapes) on all cameras, or just doing a line cut in addition to running ISOs on a handful of the cameras.  The latter is how the  recent version of Hollywood Squares, for one, handled post production.

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I thought it was mentioned that it was ISOs being used since there were 10 cameras; not that we have the ability to do ISOs here, but it would have helped me out yesterday during our symphony taping that we did.  No big -- still get to use 24p so I'm happy.

FWIW, maybe it was me getting caught up, but the sweetening wasn't NEARLY as bad as some reality shows where you can tell it's been voiced in a booth.

[Jimmy Owen]

I would like more face time for the models, less face time for the family.  I think what I'm looking for is a revival of Jackpot! with models posing the riddles.

[Dbacksfan12]

[quote name=\'SRIV94\' date=\'Dec 19 2005, 09:53 PM\']Point being--this would probably play better if one contestant played for the entire hour instead of bringing on a second contestant to hurriedly rush through the opening of his game.
[/quote]
BUt how do you guarantee this can happen every time?  What if the contestant walked with the 2nd bank offer?

[tyshaun1]

[quote name=\'Jimmy Owen\' date=\'Dec 19 2005, 10:12 PM\']I would like more face time for the models

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Wouldn't we all, Jimmy, wouldn't we all (ok, except for Tammy).

And now, back to the topic.....

I also was impressed by how well executed this show was, although I'm in agreement with a couple of others. I wonder if the rest of the episodes can contain that much excitement. If not, watch for some rapid dropoffs in viewership (if they're there to begin with). And the editing/directing was quite craptacular IMO, it was too fast and many shots, especially of the audience, were unnecessary (Sorry, Randy).

Tyshaun

[BrandonFG]

[quote name=\'zachhoran\' date=\'Dec 19 2005, 08:52 PM\']Not to mention he stole the other Brandon's thunder on Claudia.

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It's cool. I made my Bed Bath and Beyond run earlier. :-P

[SRIV94]

[quote name=\'Modor\' date=\'Dec 19 2005, 09:20 PM\'][quote name=\'SRIV94\' date=\'Dec 19 2005, 09:53 PM\']Point being--this would probably play better if one contestant played for the entire hour instead of bringing on a second contestant to hurriedly rush through the opening of his game.
[/quote]
BUt how do you guarantee this can happen every time?  What if the contestant walked with the 2nd bank offer?

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Point taken.  You can't.  so this game is lot of sizzle and not a lot of steak (as Chri$ put it), maybe it would work better as a half-hour vehicle (they you can edit or pad as necessary, since it's likely you could easily fit a game into 30 minutes).

Not being very familiar with how DoND plays internationally, I don't know the answer to this--are all incarnations one hour?

Doug -- and the countdown to 1700 continues

[curtking]

[quote name=\'Modor\' date=\'Dec 19 2005, 10:20 PM\']But how do you guarantee this can happen every time?  What if the contestant walked with the 2nd bank offer?
[/quote]
They've pretty much guaranteed that a player will play until at least the 4th or 5th offer, unless the player isn't terribly sharp or is very, very unlucky.

I'm really disappointed with the distribution of dollar amounts.  There are seven dollar amounts $100,000 or above.  As long as a player does not knock off all seven of those, the offers will almost always keep escalating.

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As an example, look at the first contestant from tonight's show.  Even after knocking off the $750K and $1M, she still got four escalating offers before there was a drop.  Even after the drop, she still got her two highest offers of the night with the 6th and 7th offer.

You'd have to be extraordinarily unlucky to knock off a majority of the $100K+ cases early.  You're going to get increasing offers each time, so there's not much incentive to even consider the offers.

Howie was great, as was the set, the models, the music, and <suckup> man, was that audience hot! </suckup>.

But honestly, I did not feel the tension that I've felt watching either the British or the Dutch versions.

Curt

[DrJWJustice]

[quote name=\'nbcburbank\' date=\'Dec 19 2005, 08:23 PM\']Howie is a great host. The game is very suspensful. This is some exciting Television. Claudia Looked great. I Like it!

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I Agree with Brandon brooks.  For once.  This thread is Pointless!  Its Beginning, anyway.  Here's a Scarecrow Award!  A perfect Award for something as brainless as the start of this Thread.