See also: Temptation, US. Holy crap did that mess up -- references to the next show were always, always \"next time\" and they didn\'t get around to the first tapings until March 2008. And even if a champ left, there was still the growing-to-$5,000 Instant Cash.
And the Instant Cash still grew on its predecessor, the actual Sale of the Century, no matter what. Not a good point to argue with.
I\'m not talking about Instant Cash growing -- my point was that Instant Cash was, for example, $1,000 on the first aired episode (single-run markets, at least) and sometimes bounced around in value because the show was airing out of order.
(As an aside, per an old topic on this forum, the single-run and double-run episodes actually switched slots shortly into the run.)
...But Jeopardy! has zero problem airing in order and announcing when champs will take time off due to an upcoming special week. It really isn\'t hard to schedule episodes to air in order, unless you deliberately tape out of order (Wheel).
No there isn\'t but Jeopardy! is a completely different beast.
I\'m being serious when I ask this -- how so? Because it isn\'t being produced by Fremantle? Because it doesn\'t air double-run?
(On the other hand, Crosswords didn\'t have returning champs and paid dearly by playing format hopscotch.)
I\'m willing to bet the \"format hopscotch\" thing was about as far from the reason why Crosswords failed as it was that the game mechanics were broken. And I gotta argue against that anyway, because it wasn\'t \"format hopscotch\". It was \"payout hopscotch.\"
Fair enough, and I appreciate the correction.
I\'m sure it was confusing to at least some people, though. \"They weren\'t playing for trips yesterday!\", for example, or -- and this actually happened to me because I was in a double-run market -- \"Why are they showing the episode they just got finished airing?\"
(Yes, the single-run and double-run schedules actually bounced around so much they ended up getting to the same episode on the same day. That...really shouldn\'t happen.)
Hence my suggestion to give losing families $1,000 instead. The winners of a particular episode then get that when they lose.
Which solves nothing.
Admittedly, I forgot about Feud paying families\' travel expenses, so thanks for the correction. If they still do that, then $500 consolation money is actually quite fine. If they don\'t, then it should be $1,000 in line with Wheel, Jeopardy!, and Millionaire.