All Stories FeedFirst Review: Power of Ten
And the survey says…..
Nine’s new Power of Ten premiered tonight with Steve Jacobs in a new role -game show host.
Like The Rich List, this is essentially a variation of the old Family Feud format. Bert must be kicking himself. This time however, there is a dash of Millionaire thrown in for good measure. Aside from the rather unfortunate title (pity it wasn’t the Power of Nine) there are some inherent problems with the format.
US host Drew Carey has $10m to play with, meaning the show starts off with $1000 rather than the $100 starting price here. By the time sixty minutes of television was over, Jacobs had awarded the grand total of $200 between two contestants. Big problemo.
Had the show moved more swiftly through the game rounds we might have seen a third contestant win some real dollars. One of the reasons they can’t is an early elimination round to decide which of two contestants will compete for the $1M. It’s a waste of time. Millionaire doesn’t have to muddle through a preliminary round to decide who will face off with Eddie. Just introduce a contestant and get on with it. Invariably with these things, networks are locked into US formats that don’t allow them to vary from such problems.
Jacobs was impressive in his new role. Confident, clearly-spoken, amiable and working off the script with ease. Likability is an important quality in this task and he showed no problems in deserving such. As for the gameplay itself, I’m not especially interested in learning how many Aussies know a bloke named ‘Kevin’ let alone dragging it out for several minutes.
The exuberant audience needed hosing down before they recorded. This isn’t America. They were nearly as painful as the Gladiators crowd with their constant shouting and incessant “whoaaaaa’s.”
And can we drop the Telstra logo, please? Surely that wasn’t in the US format?
At a 7:30pm timeslot a gameshow needs to be giving away big bucks. Remember, we have naughty tourists and dynamite dancers being culled to choose from. Perhaps at thirty minutes Power of Ten could cut to the chase with more precision. Shorter, better, faster, less. How many Aussies would vote for that?
Power of Ten airs 7:30pm Mondays on Nine.
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I auditioned for this poor excuse for a show, and the fact that the prize money was ONE-TENTH of the American version didn’t go down too well.
To finally give away the million, contestants would have to get the exact percentage of the last question (a one-in-ten stab-in-the-dark).
I predicted it would last two episodes, and was glad to be proved right.
Nine has to stop treating viewers (and contestants) with contempt if it wants to keep these shows on air.
i found this to be really irritating, steve jacobs was ok, but the audience cooing just wont work in Australia and the amount of time it took the dial to settle on the answer was making me want to throw something at the TV, it only just scraped over 700K viewers so I dont think it will be around for long, wonder if we will see Today Tonight do a story on the contestants from any unaired episodes that done get their money..he he
True, Thomas, that was used for many years. But it was also dropped. Last series there was none of that.
I totally agree with you with the performance of Steve Jacobs. Very relaxed and comfortable, lively audience to help him along and did not feel fake or forced. I was abit worried about Nine doing a prime time game show (7:30 > ) without Eddie being the star of the show but it worked.
I also agree that the current format is not the best and the time filling features do not help.
If they want to keep the hour long format, I suggest they shorten the contestant selection round to best of 3 instead of best of 5 and also rename the show “Power of 2″ or even better, “Double Up” or something along those lines. It doesn’t sound as impressive but the format would be more exciting. You can cut the time wasting exercises (e.g. dial spinning randomly for 15 seconds) and have dollar amounts starting at $1,000 going up by the power of 2 to $64,000, then have Millionare style amounts to $1,000,000. Nobody is ever going to go for the million and risk leaving with only $10,000.
Or they could put it on at 5:00 in a half hour format but they would have to seriously tweak it because as we found out, pre-news game shows need to wrap up the game they are playingin the same episode. Maybe they keep the 1 vs. 1 system and have a contestant win $1,000 for every survey and they stay on until another contestant beats them and becomes the champion and it rolls on from there.
> Millionaire doesn’t have to muddle through a preliminary round to decide who will face off with Eddie.
huh ? What about the preliminary round where they ask 10 people a question and the one who answers correctly the fastest gets to “face off” with Eddie ?