What I appreciated most about Double Dare was the use of the long form pyramidal question. Very difficult to write, they work very well as a player because there is always the mental tension of "do I know the answer" coupled with "I better answer anyway before my opponent does." These tend to reward the better player more often than a traditional quiz because they include depth of knowledge of a particular subject as well as basic recall.
However, it is very hard to pull that off in a television setting, because it can be a little too rewarding for the good player or it can be very boring. Because of this, each game of DD essentially boiled down to three different outcomes:
[*]Two good, well matched players: Neither player used their dares often enough, game takes too long
[*]Two poor players: Answers came deeper in the pool (i.e.: 8th clue vs. 4th clue), dares went out of scope, game takes too long
[*]One good, one poor player: Good player could double dare on almost every turn, game doesn't take long enough
[/list]And the spoiler round, always, always took too long. Six clues (two gimmies, two marginal, two no ways) would have been a lot better than the 3-2-3 pattern. And PhDs are not necessarily pop culture mavens, which the questions began to lean towards as the series progressed. If this was to come back today I think you would see one PhD, one celebrity and Ken Jennings.
I would love to find any and all documentation on the development cycle of this pilot. On one hand, you have Jay Wolpert, for whom any idea is great, the wackier the better. But your boss is Mark Goodson, who is conservative on what he puts on the air, tests many, many things and eventually steers his shows towards a familiar pattern. How different was this game in Jay's original concept as opposed to what eventually hit the air? This is also one of those rare cases where a hard-quizzer came out of the Goodson stable, something he really only did well once (Winner Take All).
--Mike
