Acceptable ‘Deal’

In a moment of candor, the folks at Endemol’s Netherlands headquarters would probably admit that Deal or No Deal isn’t much of a format and that its success depends on what you do with it.  What showrunner Scott St. John has done with it in its weekly American incarnation on NBC is turn it into the kind of unbridled tearjerker not seen since Warren Hull and Jack Bailey were presiding over Strike it Rich and Queen for a Day in the paleolithic era of television, with desperately needy, desperately obnoxious or just plain desperate contestants, bolstered by their bellowing families in the peanut gallery, wanting that case brought to them by one of Howie Mandel’s racks of meat to contain the $1 million grand prize and change their lives forever–or until the IRS calls.  Despite the fact that even some diehard game show fans find it hard to take, after almost three years on the air Deal is still the only show on the NBC schedule to regularly place in the Nielsen Top 20 that isn’t football or Law and Order.

However, St. John can’t go for the full-borne waterworks on the new weekday syndicated version, which started last week.  Since he has to complete a game with a lower-stakes $500,000 grand prize in half the time of the prime time version (although with 4 less cases–the number that the UK daily version deals with in 45 minutes), there’s not a lot of time for the bathos that the prime time viewers seem to love so much.  Not that the contestants, who replace the models as the case guarders unless they get picked to play the game (they stay on for the entire week), still don’t have their hard luck or impossible dream stories for the show’s “story producers” to have Mandel stress as they search for their instant relief–he just can’t do it as much since there’s a game to complete before the bottom of the hour.  And the show is the better for sacrificing the too-pregnant pauses, the drawnnnn-out reveals and the overwrought (and often spoiling) teases by announcer Joe Cipriano.  (Not that they still do a little too often the “open the case–after these messages” bit.)

And is there a game to speak of?  There can be, if the show’s “Banker” (or the producers) can make offers that can switch between enticing and mocking in a sort of cat-and-mouse with the contestant.  On the prime time version, the strategy seems to be to dangle a lot of money and watch them scream.  Thanks to a lower budget, the offers here are at least making the contestants ponder the odds and possible circumstances before the “NO DEAL, HOWIE!”–and they also seem to be booking some contestants who will want to think about what they’re getting into–unlike the prime time lot greedily going after every dollar they can–and have sense enough to take the money and run if things are not looking well for them.

Still, if your idea of a game show is a little more than opening cases and screaming “NO DEAL, HOWIE!”, the faster, more streamlined Deal won’t make much of a difference.  And I wonder if the mouth-breathers are so transfixed by ONE MEELION DOLLARS (ever after they gave it away in prime time for the first time earlier this month) that seeing the game played for lower stakes isn’t going to be a turnoff.  At least it’s better than Temptation, but that ain’t sayin’ much.