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Who Wants to Be "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?"
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In 1999, things were looking bleak for the American Game Show genre. There were no prime-time network game shows, and the only shows around on the networks and syndication were holdovers from the 1970s and 1980s—The Price Is Right, Whoopi Goldberg's The Hollywood Squares revival, the new (and lamest) Match Game revival, and evergreens Wheel of Fortune and Jeopardy!. Cable games weren't faring much better—most of the networks had either cancelled them (Lifetime, FOX Family), were shying away from game shows (Nickelodeon), or had completely rid themselves of them (USA Network). Even GSN was at a low point, with several originals being either cancelled or not very good at all, and having just come out of their "Dark Period" where they lost the rights to almost every Goodson-Todman show. Then ABC decided to try out an American version of a British show called Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?, and quicker than you could say "A Mark Goodson/Bill Todman Production", a new era in the old format was born. In many ways, it was a throwback to the original quiz show format that prevailed in The '50s, when shows like Dotto, Twenty-One, and The $64,000 Question focused on big-money prizes and tests of general knowledge instead of the word games, puzzles, and panel games that took over in the '60s and '70s. What separated it from its '50s forebears (beyond, of course, the fact that it wasn't rigged) was the presentation, glamorous and spectacular with a focus on high drama and tension, the money and the difficulty raising the stakes for the contestants and the viewers rooting for them at home. Of course, when a show is successful, everybody else wants to Follow the Leader. Many games, specifically in primetime, shamelessly borrowed many of the elements that made Millionaire so unique and successful. The oversaturation of Millionaire-styled game show clones largely withered away during The New '10s, as most contemporary game shows since that point have largely reverted to more conventional formats (including modernized revivals of classic formats). |
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http://dbpedia.org/resource/Who_Wants_to_Be_a_Millionaire? | |
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Trailers Always Spoil | |
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Giving away the outcomes of upcoming games, in the hope that it'll entice people to watch. | |
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Darker and Edgier | |
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Himmel oder Hölle (Heaven or Hell): Millionaire meets a much Darker and Edgier Double Dare (1986). A single contestant (in season 3, team of two) faces ten levels to win a €50,000 grand prize. On each level, they may elect to "stay in Heaven" (answer a given multiple-choice question) or "go to Hell" (not answer the question, but perform a rather painful stunt, such as playing basketball with cacti, getting a bad haircut or going through an electrified maze). Broadcasted on the German channel ProSieben; hosted by Jochen Schropp (Heaven) and Evelyn Weigert (Hell). | |
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Title Drop | |
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Power of 10: Players answered survey questions to win up to ten million dollars "by the power of 10". The aim was to accurately guess how a national sample polled on a question with the margin decreasing for each new question: a 40% range for the $1,000 question, 30% for $10,000, 20% for $100,000, and 10% for the final, $1,000,000 question. The $10,000,000 prize was for any player who could provide the exact percentage for that final question. Missing a question ($100,000 onwards) decreased the prize, also "by the power of 10". | |
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Kayfabe | |
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However, several other shows went the extra mile and resorted to Kayfabe. After its sponsor was unimpressed by how the contestants performed in early episodes, Twenty-One became outright scripted—with contestants being told to answer certain questions in specific ways, to win or lose specific matches, and coached on how to portray themselves on-air. The most infamous example was that of Herb Stempel, who was portrayed as a scrawny underdog and spent six weeks as champion. That is, until ratings were falling and they decided to bring in a new champion they felt would be more appealing: university professor Charles Van Doren—who became a celebrity after "winning" $129,000 on the show. | |
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Unwinnable by Design | |
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Multiple-choice questions that tend to get more obscure and trivial as you progress, practically making the advertised jackpot Unwinnable by Design unless you happened to be an expert on the final question. Sometimes the show will water down the questions specifically when the producers recognize a drought in grand prize winners (or when the show is starting to flag in ratings and/or quality). | |
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All or Nothing | |
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The American version has been showing signs of this ever since Millionaire has been introduced to the United States. At first, Wheel mainly borrowed the usage of darker sets and heartbeat soundtrack additions to the Speed-Up and the Bonus Round. Later on, the Mystery Round was introduced with the show revealing the backs of the wedges whenever they are hit shortly afterward. Then, the Million-Dollar Wedge was introduced for Season 26 with the prize available in the Bonus Round if the contestant wins possessing said wedge. After the $1,000,000 was won within a month of its introduction, the show made the prize harder to win by making the second Bankrupt present throughout the whole game. Plenty of trailers have suggested that somebody could win the top prize even if the wedge is merely picked up. | |
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Smoking Gun | |
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Stempel attempted to expose the fraud, but it wasn't until a Smoking Gun exposing coaching on another quiz show, Dotto, that he was taken seriously. The scandal was a Genre-Killer for the big-money game show, with networks preferring more low-stakes games and more control over productions; it took until the 1970's for shows such as The $10,000 Pyramid to break the five-figure barrier again, while the 1986 The $1,000,000 Chance of a Lifetime was the first to break the seven-figure barrier as an annuity (but as mentioned, besides the bonus round, it was otherwise a typical game show of the era). In the 1990's, Michael Davies, an ABC executive was actively considering reviving Question, until he caught wind of Who Wants To Be a Millionaire?, and decided to pursue a U.S. version of that instead. CBS filmed a pilot for a revival in 2000 to capitalize on Millionaire (with a top prize of $1,028,000), but it didn't make it to air (and as mentioned, the network ultimately decided to order a big-money version of Winning Lines—another series from the studio behind Millionaire). | |
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Downplayed Trope | |
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Downplayed with MrBeast's $1,000,000 Challenge. It had the large cash prize, had more moments played for drama, and its final part had a darker atmosphere and had foreboding soundtrack, complete with confetti getting dumped on the winner. But it still didn't completely shed the goofiness of MrBeast challenges; for instance, one of the qualifiers involved being the last to sit on a toilet, and the finale had the coaches go home and cook a meal for their contestants. | |
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What Could Have Been | |
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It's Your Chance of a Lifetime: FOX brought this out in June 2000 to try and give Greed a companion. The only differences between this show and its forefather were: an opening question to pay off a credit card bill, only nine questions in your stack instead of 15, and wagering on each question to determine its value. Aside from that, probably the closest imitator of the bunch, as well as the shortest-lived—only lasting a single, week-long event before getting canned (though it was supposed to be a full weekly series; but FOX's then-new president hated game shows so he stopped it from happening). The series was originally created by Australia's Seven Network (where it was known as the Million Dollar Chance of a Lifetime, unrelated to the U.S. syndicated game show of the same name) after a rival acquired the rights to Millionaire. | |
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Race Against the Clock | |
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Dramatic ticking if a clock format is used in some way. Expect the ticking to sound even more pressuring near the last seconds of the countdown. | |
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Nintendo Hard | |
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While they have not been held again since (later primetime specials have been more in line with the daytime shows but with more celebrity guests, now known as The Price is Right At Night), the daytime show has since held annual theme weeks—typically during sweeps—featuring pricing games played for large cash prizes (Big Money Week) or luxury and sports cars (Dream Car Week). In most cases, these prizes are assigned to games known for their difficulty, such as 3 Strikes, Pay the Rent (which, coincidentally, recycled the aforementioned $1,000,000 sign for its introduction), and Plinko. | |
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Railroad Tracks of Doom | |
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During Millionaire's original ABC run, Operation Lifesaver produced a railroad crossing safety video for motorists titled Final Answer, produced as a mock game show in this style. Three contestants come across something relating to a railroad crossing and the host gives each contestant a multiple-choice question (such as what a railroad crossing protected only by crossbuck signs means, or what to do if you're in backed-up traffic approaching a crossing), and if the contestant gives the wrong answer, he or she is hit by a train at the crossing. The host even asks each contestant, "Is that your final answer?" The first two contestants give the wrong answer and are killed off by trains, while the third contestant, hoping to make it to a business dinner on time, gives the correct answer, and her prize is that she gets to make it to the restaurant on time. (Though the host also provides a "what-if" scenario showing if she chose an incorrect answer and the consequences that'd play out.) | |
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Ratings Stunt | |
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Occasional special episodes, such as those with guest stars playing for charity, those where the top prize value is hiked, or those where something is done to sweeten the jackpot, such as the possibility of winning a new car. | |
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Exactly What It Says on the Tin | |
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Another show that followed in Millionaire's footsteps was the Arabian game show Waznak Dahab (Your Weight In Gold), which was broadcast by Abu Dhabi TV between 2002 and 2003. Contestants faced 18 general knowledge questions with three possible answers, each worth a specific value of gold (from 100 grams to their body weight—the minimum jackpot is 50 kilograms). Unlike Millionaire, however, contestants were not allowed to walk away on any questions and there were no predefined "safety nets"; they had to use "gold cards" (which were earned via a preliminary round consisting of 5 true-or-false questions) in order to exchange a question for a new one or set the value of the current question as a "safety net". The concept of setting the value of a question as a "safety net" was later adopted by UK version of Millionaire when it was revived in May 2018. | |
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Lifelines | |
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Lifelines. | |
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Speed Round | |
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Multi Millionär (Multimillionaire): Simply a more forboding, casino-themed Millionaire, down to the logo. A contestant would be chosen at random from 36 around the "roulette wheel" stage. A one-minute Speed Round started things off where each right answer awarded 100 DM, and each wrong answer or pass costed 100 DM. The player needed a positive score to move on to the front game, which was basically a 13 Millionaire-style-question gauntlet, except it was always double-or-nothing, material difficulties were shuffled and leaving was not an option after a question appeared. Questions came in "cards" from deuce to ace, and options in the four "suits". Viewers could call in to be chosen as a helper should the studio contestant needed them, and possibly win a tenth of whatever they won. The show was broadcasted live on the German private network RTL II in 2001, hosted by the equally omnious musician Phil Daub (who, since 2013, has voiced the computer for Celebrity Big Brother). | |
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Filler | |
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Gratuitous Filler and/or Padding, such as pauses before the reveal of the answers (sometimes spilling over into commercial breaks). Sometimes coupled with running out of time and having to wait till the next episode to see the exciting conclusion. And of course, the mandatory segment where the contestant tells the audience and host a little about him/herself (including any dramatic backstories he/she may have). Which can result in: Camera shots of friends, family members, or relatives of the contestants sitting in the audience (or meaningful photos on hand if the people in question could not be there for the taping) being sprinkled in intermittently during the episodes as a sympathetic-empathetic appeal to the at-home audience. |
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Giant Novelty Check | |
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A commemorative over-sized check being presented to the contestant when he/she becomes a top prize winner; and... | |
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Opt Out | |
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Benchmark values/"safety nets" that act as a tantalizing Opt Out and are used to dissuade contestants from reaching the top value. Contestants are given the option to walk away with what they've won in between these benchmarks, usually starting off with small guaranteed amounts to ensure contestants don't walk away with nothing, but then escalating to potentially life-changing amounts (such as enough to pay off tuition or mortgage that will almost certainly cause contestants who have their family's welfare in mind foremost to walk away on the dot) with more unforgiving drops from accumulated winnings to the last benchmark if the contestant messes up. Conversely, the benchmarks can propel a contestant forward when he/she has nothing to lose. Let's Just See What WOULD Have Happened: If a contestant does opt out because he/she fears he/she can't answer right, he/she's probed for the answer he/she would have said anyway. If it's a wrong answer, then it's a sigh of relief for the contestant, knowing he/she quit at just the right time. If it's a right answer, however, then it is an utterly ruthless moment of Yank the Dog's Chain. |
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Ur-Example | |
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A discussion of overdramatic, big money quiz shows is not complete without the Ur-Example from CBS, The $64,000 Question. Based on Take It or Leave It—a popular radio quiz from the 1940s, the show offered the chance for contestants to win up to $64,000 by answering questions regarding a single specialized subject. The contestant's money doubled with each correct answer, starting with $64 (the original top prize of the radio version), up towards $512, then to $1,000 and beyond. Beginning at $4,000, contestants only played one level per-episode, and at $8,000, the contestant answered questions from a Sound Proof Booth. The questions also got more demanding too, often requiring multiple answers. The show made a huge deal out of all of these aforementioned features, as well as having security guards on set and an IBM sorting machine for "randomizing" the questions, to play up the drama. The series was a massive hit, to the point that its big winners became instant celebrities, Question overtook I Love Lucy as the #1 show of the 1955–56 season, and other big-money game shows of the era, such as 21, took numerous stylistic cues from Question. It also had a competitive spin-off series, The $64,000 Challenge. There was one other feature that Question and several other game shows of the era shared: dishonesty. At the time, sponsors held a high degree of influence over the production of television programs, and it was in their best interests to keep viewer interest (and in turn, ratings) high. It was common for shows to play up contestants with personalities and stories that would be memorable to the audience, so that viewers would be encouraged to continue following their journey every week. Revlon CEO Charles Revson frequently meddled against contestants he didn't like, such as Joyce Brothers—who was forced into having boxing be her category. However, she beat the producers at their own game by studying the subject extensively, and became the only woman to win the $64,000 grand prize. Oh, and that IBM sorting machine? It was just a prop. However, several other shows went the extra mile and resorted to Kayfabe. After its sponsor was unimpressed by how the contestants performed in early episodes, Twenty-One became outright scripted—with contestants being told to answer certain questions in specific ways, to win or lose specific matches, and coached on how to portray themselves on-air. The most infamous example was that of Herb Stempel, who was portrayed as a scrawny underdog and spent six weeks as champion. That is, until ratings were falling and they decided to bring in a new champion they felt would be more appealing: university professor Charles Van Doren—who became a celebrity after "winning" $129,000 on the show. Stempel attempted to expose the fraud, but it wasn't until a Smoking Gun exposing coaching on another quiz show, Dotto, that he was taken seriously. The scandal was a Genre-Killer for the big-money game show, with networks preferring more low-stakes games and more control over productions; it took until the 1970's for shows such as The $10,000 Pyramid to break the five-figure barrier again, while the 1986 The $1,000,000 Chance of a Lifetime was the first to break the seven-figure barrier as an annuity (but as mentioned, besides the bonus round, it was otherwise a typical game show of the era). In the 1990's, Michael Davies, an ABC executive was actively considering reviving Question, until he caught wind of Who Wants To Be a Millionaire?, and decided to pursue a U.S. version of that instead. CBS filmed a pilot for a revival in 2000 to capitalize on Millionaire (with a top prize of $1,028,000), but it didn't make it to air (and as mentioned, the network ultimately decided to order a big-money version of Winning Lines—another series from the studio behind Millionaire). |
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Executive Meddling | |
| Who Wants to Be "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?" / int_b6de94d1 | comment |
There was one other feature that Question and several other game shows of the era shared: dishonesty. At the time, sponsors held a high degree of influence over the production of television programs, and it was in their best interests to keep viewer interest (and in turn, ratings) high. It was common for shows to play up contestants with personalities and stories that would be memorable to the audience, so that viewers would be encouraged to continue following their journey every week. Revlon CEO Charles Revson frequently meddled against contestants he didn't like, such as Joyce Brothers—who was forced into having boxing be her category. However, she beat the producers at their own game by studying the subject extensively, and became the only woman to win the $64,000 grand prize. Oh, and that IBM sorting machine? It was just a prop. | |
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Subverted Trope | |
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Subverted on one occasion with a Retraux version of the original (Who Would Like To Win £100?) set in the middle of World War II. | |
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Dramatic Disappearing Display | |
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Dark theater-in-the-round sets adorned with complex lighting setups. The lights may grow progressively darker as the stakes get higher until they finally all go out. | |
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Confetti Drop | |
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Obscene amounts of confetti being dumped from the rafters when the contestants actually do win the grand prize (not shown: the janitors demanding a pay raise during the cleanup after the show's over). | |
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Heartbeat Soundtrack | |
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Foreboding music, oftentimes involving a Heartbeat Soundtrack. The music will become more suspenseful as contestants reach more substantial dollar figures, ending with a minimal but intense "heartbeat" on the final question. It will also react with the outcome of the game, with triumphant fanfares after big wins, dramatic stings when choices are eliminated, etc. | |
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Bonus Round | |
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The show has its roots in a Dutch lottery game show, Miljoenenjacht (Hunt for Millions): initially, it was a fairly straightforward Millionaire clone from 2000 to 2002, except that the majority of the game was a quiz competition that whittled an audience to one player (with different types of questions and buy-outs along the way), who would play a Bonus Round of 7 general knowledge questions for a top prize of 10,000,000 gulder (with each question adding a 0 to the prize, a la Grand Game on The Price Is Right). This round was later replaced by the briefcase game that formed the basis of the Deal or No Deal format. Some early versions of Deal (including an unsold pilot of the U.S. version filmed for ABC, and the earliest episodes of the Australian version) maintained a downsized series of quiz rounds to determine their player, but some picked a contestant at random from a pool of potential players on-stage instead—who open the boxes or briefcases during the game, and stayed on the show until they were picked to play. By contrast, the U.S. version and those based upon it tended to use pre-selected contestants, and had the briefcases staffed by a crew of models instead. | |
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Spin-Off | |
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The star-studded Spin-Off, appropriately titled StarQuiz, seems to look even more akin to Millionaire - two teams of two celebrities play at a time, each of which would answer up to 11 individual questions on a money tree topping out at €150,000 (questioning alternates between the two teams) and would receive two helps: "Zweite Chance" (Second Chance, basically Double Dip from Super Millionaire) and "Schieben" (Push, which merely discards the question). | |
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Hilarious in Hindsight | |
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Hilarious in Hindsight: Kimmel wound up hosting an ABC primetime revival of Millionaire in 2020, where one of the Lifelines ended up being "Ask the Host". | |
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Expy | |
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Das Quiz mit Jörg Pilawa (The Quiz with Jörg Pilawa): A straight-up Expy from the German free-to-air network ARD1, premiering in 2001 (two years after RTL acquired the rights to Millionaire and shortly after Jörg Pilawa, the presenter, left Die Quiz Show—the German version of the aforementioned It’s Your Chance of a Lifetime). Distinctions include: teams of two instead of a solo person play (with each question played by one member, then the other gets to decide whether to agree or to use a Veto to reject and change the answer; roles switch for every next level), a money tree with twelve levels (in which the players themselves choose two safety nets before starting the game) for a grand prize originally at 500,000 DM (then €300,000 from 2002 to 2010, down to €50,000 for the 2020-2021 revival) and instead of lifelines are four "Vetos", each of which can be used to override a given answer; one Veto can alternatively switch the current question out. The show was also vastly popular among German viewers; DVD, video and board game versions have also been released. The star-studded Spin-Off, appropriately titled StarQuiz, seems to look even more akin to Millionaire - two teams of two celebrities play at a time, each of which would answer up to 11 individual questions on a money tree topping out at €150,000 (questioning alternates between the two teams) and would receive two helps: "Zweite Chance" (Second Chance, basically Double Dip from Super Millionaire) and "Schieben" (Push, which merely discards the question). |
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Let's Just See What WOULD Have Happened | |
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Let's Just See What WOULD Have Happened: If a contestant does opt out because he/she fears he/she can't answer right, he/she's probed for the answer he/she would have said anyway. If it's a wrong answer, then it's a sigh of relief for the contestant, knowing he/she quit at just the right time. If it's a right answer, however, then it is an utterly ruthless moment of Yank the Dog's Chain. | |
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No Budget | |
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Perhaps the earliest clone was an obscure entry for the equally-obscure America One network, The Million Dollar Word Game (premiering in 1999), in which contestants had to clear through 14 rounds of word unscrambling and creating anagrams in order to reach a prize board where they could possibly win $1,000,000. However, from a production standpoint, it had a very No Budget look more akin to a public access show than one purporting to give away $1,000,000 (at the start of the circulating episode, the host even announced that they would be increasing the top prize to $5,000,000!), and the host's demeanor slowed things down more than anything. | |
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Lie Detector | |
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Moment of Truth: The hopefuls were called upon to answer highly embarrassing and potentially damaging questions about themselves (affairs and past crimes were common subjects), with a prize structure similar to that on Millionaire (and pyramid schemes, apparently). The contender faced a maximum of 21 questions for a grand prize of $500,000 and could only walk away before seeing their next question. Not answering truthfully as determined by a lie detectornote Prior to the show, with the help of the lie detector, the contender was asked from 50 to 100 questions, 21 of which would be reused in the show sent them home with nothing... except all the humiliation that may ensue. (Later they set $25,000 as a safety net, though.) The friends and family joining had an access to a big glowing button that may be used only once during the game (at their mercy) to switch the question in case the current one was too unbearable. | |
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