The complaints about it remind me of the first flight of Duel episodes, especially the premiere. They record however much tape that they do, expecting a 60 minute premiere and figuring that they'll cut a half-hour of banter and padding and what do you know, ABC says "can you have a 90 minute episode to kick if off?" and the whole enterprise huffs and wheezes along. What I've heard is that 15-to-1 was meant to fill a smaller news hole than it ended up taking on so the episode has all that much more filler, which is unheard of for a game that's pretty well question-question-question all the way through. (One thing that I'm impressed by is the fact that the show was able to cut down twelve contestants at roughly the same time each episode, rather than needing to make lots of edits and jump cuts or pointless extra empty calories.) It is similar to the way that so many of our game shows are retreaded out for another go and they get something terribly wrong and the new version falls flat.
