500 Questions

[TLEberle]

What exactly is the significance of the 500 questions?

It's a BIIIIIG Number! It's really biiiiig!

[pacdude]

The timer should have started at, say, $1,000 or $5,000 and trickled down during the ten seconds.

[Matt Ottinger]

EDIT: Maybe he's suggesting that each player has their own bank that they carry with them when they switch?  If so, then my last statement means nothing and Player B gets $1,000 only.

...and the right to play again, which is almost as offensive.

All fair points, but on the whole, i think Veggiemaster* is on the right track.  A self-contained 50-question game is a good idea, though obviously the current format isn't conducive to that, because the game could be over in three.  As a seventies daytime game, they'd do fifty in thirty minutes, easy.  These days, it would be nice to force them to squeeze fifty into an hour.

*Can't possibly be what it stands for.

[clemon79]

A self-contained 50-question game is a good idea, though obviously the current format isn't conducive to that, because the game could be over in three.

As long as they come up with a better title, because right now near as I can tell the only meaning 500 Questions has is that's when they throw your ass off the show.

[Jimmy Owen]

500 questions and 200 of them are "Why?"

[dale_grass]

500 questions and 200 of them are "Why?"

Hi-yo!

[TLEberle]

One of my agents in the field says that it is possible to survive the marathon and win no money. Is it possible to miss out in the milestone money for 25 and 50 questions?

[Matt Ottinger]

One of my agents in the field says that it is possible to survive the marathon and win no money. Is it possible to miss out in the milestone money for 25 and 50 questions?

Based on what I've seen, it is possible, but only on a theoretical level.  You only get money if you answer correctly on your first answer, but any subsequent answer within the ten seconds keeps you alive and in the game.  So if you manage to answer a decent percentage of the 500 Questions, yet fail to get a single one of them on your first response, yeah, you'd go home with nothing.  Otherwise, you pocket your bank every 50 questions.  Unless there's some gambling they introduce at a higher level.

[jdhernandez]

I will simply say this about "500 Questions," this show gets so repetitive and has such sluggish pacing that it borders on annoying. Thank goodness I can skip over the commercials on my DVR otherwise I'd doze off.


This is tough for me to watch ...to the point that I have already made a drinking game out of 500 Questions. This is the only way to watch it. My favorite one is "2 drinks every time Richard Quest counts to three with his fingers for 'three strikes in a row' to a contestant's face."

/Also, +1 drink if the crowd follows that with everyone saying "GONE!"
//I might be more than a little buzzed tomorrow...

[That Don Guy]

One of my agents in the field says that it is possible to survive the marathon and win no money. Is it possible to miss out in the milestone money for 25 and 50 questions?

Yes, as you don't get the money for the 25 milestone unless you would normally get $1000 (or $3000 for a Triple Threat) for that question.

Also, you have to lose every Battle and Top Ten Challenge you are in, as well as miss every Triple Threat, and (as already said) not answer any of the "normal" questions correctly on your first guess, but get enough of them right in order to keep from getting three questions in a row wrong.

[The Ol' Guy]

Just caught it for the first time tonight. So...okay. Tons of visual sizzle, wafer-thin steak. Almost one of the versions of You Bet Your Life with flashy graphics replacing repartee with a master wit. Groucho's version of the game was also lame (4 in a row right, win, two wrong in a row and you're...gone!), but at least you actually had games completed in minutes. I'm rooting along with you for a good game or quiz show of some kind to come back, but still, these hour-long stretch fests are snoozers.

[Caustic Window]

First of all, can we give some appreciation to the fact that they are actually seeking out smart, reasonable people to be on the show, as opposed to... whatever kind of pseudo-people as contestants the Endemol craze started?

I like that smart people are answering tough questions.  That's a good start.   The set is great.  The questions are a little generic, but the battles and the top tens spice it up some.   The way contestants can keep guessing to avoid a 'wrong' is a nice touch.   Richard Quest's hosting works for me.   He's charged up, but I think he's staying well behind the line of being obnoxious, and if that's the trade-off for having contestants that don't act like lunatics, I'll take it.

People here are correct that the challenger has too little affect on the game.   I'm not sure how to tweak it though.   One idea is to have the challenger take over if they win three battles in a row.   Rare, but at least it's something the challenger has some control over, and gives some meaning to the battles other than "oh darn, that's a wrong" which happens regularly anyway.

Yeah, the big problem is the pacing, which is mostly down to the awful conversations that the host incites, surely at producers' behest.  The current champion, this poor guy, has had to explain why he's leading or following at least ten times now, and I'm getting that eye twitch from excessive insipid conversations that plagued me when The Weakest Link was on.  This show becomes a lot more digestible on DVR when you can skip all of the chit-chat, and that's not a good thing for live ratings.   And there's definitely some hypocrisy at play when you boast that all of your contestants are GENIUSES, then turn around and ask them over and over why they're leading or following like it's some deep strategy, or saying things like "WHOA!  You've answered one question in that category and got it wrong!  WHY WOULD YOU CHOOSE THAT CATEGORY, YOU'RE TERRIBLE AT IT??" 

[Mr. Armadillo]

Boy, you guys aren't kidding. 

"I skipped a grade in school."
"Which one?"
"Second."
"Why?"

Nice of the show to add some eye candy, though. 

(In case I need to spell it out, that's a knock on the show, not the challenger - we all know what she's capable of, but tonight she was on stage for 45 minutes and answered all of one question.)

[Sodboy13]

After watching half of one episode:

- Richard Quest comes across as an ill-conceived mating of Richard Dawson in The Running Man and Jim Henson's Creature Shop.

- "Wrongs." You're trying too hard. Three red "X"s are strikes to every viewer you have across all demographics. Don't try to overhaul common parlance into an exclusively-branded concept.

- Why is this big-money big-bombast prime-time network TV game show EVENT dribbling out cash at $1000 per question (with rare exception)? Jeopardy offers up a $900/question average five days a week for a full season. Did you blow all the budget on the set?

- I like Cory's idea of a money clock/decreasing value. My idea: The starting value for the question is n, and each incorrect response drops it by 0.1n or 0.25n.

- Another possible improvement: if a challenger wins a Battle, the strike goes up, and the contestants stay at their Battle Stations (hey, I made a semi-clever TV thingy!) until the main contestant wins one, or gets struck out and sent off. This is allegedly a head-to-head contest in some aspects; give me some legitimate freaking stakes from time to time, not just under a very special set of circumstances.

- I like the questions. I like the set. I like the contestants. Everything else is holding this back to an absurd degree.

- It's a sentiment everyone else seems to have, but this show should be a whole lot better than it is. This is a botched job.

[WarioBarker]

First of all, can we give some appreciation to the fact that they are actually seeking out smart, reasonable people to be on the show, as opposed to... whatever kind of pseudo-people as contestants the Endemol craze started?

Because it's not really a plus considering Endemol and the like gave the pseudo-people a chance at way, way more money on shows in the past?

Yeah, they're seeking out smart and reasonable people for this show and the questions are good, but I agree with Sodboy -- pretty much everything else is botched.