I'm going to disagree on the "clowning" analysis. At no point while watching the moments of levity did I think, "Just get back to the game already!" I thought the tangents were of a reasonable length and a welcome addition -- after all, I like to watch people actually having fun on a game show.
I would agree if it was the contestants being allowed to go on tangents. The celebs dominated over the contestants in the personality department, which was really a shame because a lot of the contestants had really interesting backstories I wish had been given a greater chance to develop.
It would have been equally as bad, in my opinion, to institute the traditional tiebreaker and then speed through the Winner's Circle to make up the time.
I'd rather that. If you're not going to record live-to-tape, it at least forces you to act live-to-tape.
I do agree that the constant rules recitations grew tiresome, but this is a show which hadn't been seen outside of cable for over ten years, which is long enough that casual viewers needed to be reminded of how things work. Every "new" game show moves more slowly in its first season because of this. Watch early episodes of Millionaire -- it takes forever for Regis to tell us how the game is played. Pyramid will probably be able to streamline some of that next season now that the show is in the public eye again.
Point well taken, but it took how many years on the current incarnation of Feud before they realized they didn't need to explain the rules to Fast Money every single show? The current industry doesn't paint a picture of hope that they'll come to the realization that viewers catch on quickly.
I feel like there was a lot of time spent in the second half of each episode repeating (usually verbatim) the rules explanations that were already given in the first half.
That's what happens when you piece together two half hours taped on different days.
To that end, one thing I would like to see in season two is an effort to ensure such things as the same word never coming up in the front game in both halves of an hour show. If I remember correctly, Bob Stewart's rule was a two-week minimum rest before content could be recycled. If my math is right, that means you'd need 1,680 different words to fill ten hourlong shows. A tall order for the writers, but not impossible by any means.
But if you ever have two front-game ties in the same half hour or a lot of tiebreakers in a batch of episodes, you're screwed.
Or you just edit down the blabber and stick to the game.
I haven't got the technology handy to perform this experiment, but I dare say in each hourlong show, you could easily trim 3-4 minutes of content without sacrificing any gameplay and still keep a decent amount of interplay. Considering how double tiebreakers under CBS rules were extremely rare, I doubt they really need to worry about getting pressed for time on multiple tiebreakers.