You Deserve It (?)

Recently I started watching a new game show on ABC called “You Deserve It”.  It’s a quiz show and its “gimmick” is that the contestant is playing not to win money for himself or herself, but for some special person who “deserves” the winnings.  Supposedly the intended beneficiary is left in the dark about this until the end of the show, at which point the “prize crew” surprises the person with the good news. 

 All well and fine, right?  Not exactly.

First of all, is the actual premise.  So far as I’ve seen the beneficiaries tend to be very close family members of the contestant.  I don’t know about you, but if my brother won me $200,000.00 on a game show, you can bet I’d be splitting it with him big time, probably 50/50.  These are not estranged relatives we’re talking about.  If they’re good enough to deserve this money, they’re good enough to share it with the person who actually won it for them.

 Second is the quiz system.  Like on “Wheel of Fortune”, the “answer” is a person, place, or thing, which the contestants have to guess. They get a “free clue” (which is so vague as to be meaningless) then have to “buy” 9 extra clues.  Each clue results in the prize money being reduced by a (supposedly) random amount.  Clearly the less clues you need to solve the puzzle, the more money your friend will wind up with.  The 9 clues together add up to the full prize amount, so if you were dumb enough to require all 9 clues you’d wind up with nothing.  Even 7-8 clues tend to reduce the prize amount considerably.

 One problem is that the clues are obviously very vague and many are mutually inconsistent.  You’re going to need at least 5-6 clues to get the answer.  And along the way the prize money will go down.  From what I’ve seen, in every case the maximum reduction amount always gets hit.  Not right away, but it will.  I strongly suspect it’s rigged that this amount will be hit by the 3^rd or 4^th clue every time.  Someone should keep track (next time I’m watching, I will).

 Another problem is the clues themselves.  One was outright misleading.  When the “answer” was “Barack Obama”, one clue was “basketball player” and another was “44”.  The poor contestant was racking her brain about professional basketball players, and she knew she didn’t know any who wore #44.  Does Obama play basketball?  I’m sure he does every now and then.  So does about half the country.  But to my knowledge he’s never played for the NBA, which was clearly what the game designers intended to be implied by the clue: they knew the contestant would assume “basketball player” meant “professional basketball player”.  Of course, no one believes Obama played for the NBA.  So here’s a clue which not only doesn’t help us guess Barack Obama, but which steers us AWAY from him.  And clearly the “44” clue, possibly helpful on its own, in conjunction with “basketball player” would combine in the contestant’s mind to mean “professional basketball player who wears #44”.  Clearly the game designers were aware of this.  This poor girl had to buy more clues just to offset the damage done by these two.  If a clue hurts your chances of guessing the correct answer, that’s not much of a clue, is it? 

 I would have hoped that the days of rigged TV game shows were long gone, but apparently they’re still very much alive and well.