Welcome to the first post of Game Show Week here at Various and Sundry, beginning on a Wednesday. Go fig.

Drew Carey makes for a very odd game show host. He’s not as slick as the typical game show host is. Sure, there’s always a learning curve, but there’s more to it than that for THE POWER OF 10, airing on CBS this month. Carey doesn’t do well reading from a teleprompter. He looks like a deer in the headlights when he’s facing the viewers at home, and appears stiff. Someone should tell him that when he reads, “Are you guys ready?” off the teleprompter, he should probably look at the contestants, not the camera. He’s not asking us, after all.

But he shines in those moments between the standard game show framework. Moving the game along and providing structure isn’t his strong suit. It’s his friendliness and conversational skills that the producers put him on stage for. Every contestant up there with him is an instant friend. Drew pals around with them. Being the host of a game where he doesn’t know the answers is a BIG help for Carey. He can speak freely. He can root without people questioning his motives. He can crack jokes all he wants. That’s the show’s strong suit. It’s also why he might work on THE PRICE IS RIGHT, where everyone already knows the games and it’s more important to have fun with people on stage.
POWER OF 10 isn’t terribly complicated. Think CARD SHARKS with modern graphics. Think FAMILY FUED with more numbers. Carey asks a series of questions from surveys taken of Americans, and the contestants have to guess the percentage that answered a certain way. (Would you be disappointed if your kid grew up to be a lawyer? Are you for the right for police to search a suspicious person without warrant or proof of wrongdoing?) The questions are moralistic, political, or entertaining. They run the gamut, but there are times when you’d like to know which section of America was asked the question.

The contestant is allowed to bring a friend along for guidance, and they get to survey the audience each time. These aren’t the use-one-and-you’re-done backups that MILLIONAIRE pioneered. You get them each time. You just need to keep in mind that the show is filled with an audience from New York City. The more political questions might have answers that skew in a certain direction because of that. So far, I haven’t seen anything completely crazy in that direction, but I would consider it.

The questions get progressively harder, in that the contestant gets a narrower range to guess from. With the first question, they have to guess a range of 40% for the correct answer to be in. Then 30%, 20%, 10%, and god only knows what they make you do for the final question, which is worth $10 million. If they expect you to get it right on the money, then nobody will ever go for it. (One contestant did get the spot-on correct answer that I saw last week, but I doubt he would have risked $9.9 million on that — you win $1 million before you go for $10. If you get a question wrong, you go home one level below your last correct answer. The first question is worth $1000, then $10,000, $100,000, $1 million, and $10 million.

The draw of the show is that it doesn’t require any special knowledge. You don’t need to be super smart. You don’t need to know song lyrics. But you do need to know people, in general. It’s a little smarter that way than, say, DEAL OR NO DEAL. It’s not completely random, but there is a certain degree of guess work involved.

I don’t think this one will last long. And with Carey set to host PRICE IS RIGHT on the opposite coast — POWER OF 10 is recorded, oddly enough, in New York City — I don’t think he’d miss the red eye flights back and forth, either.

It’s not a bad show, but it’s not captivating enough to get me to make time for it. I’ll watch it if it’s on, but that’s about it.

Tomorrow as Game Show Week continues: a little something from GSN.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 15th, 2007 at 10:10 am and is filed under TV. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.