Andrew Kravis, a 25-year-old law school graduate from Michigan, won $2.6 million as the clock finally ran down on NBC’s 10-night game show “The Million Second Quiz†on Thursday. That’s a nice number for him â€" NBC claimed it was the largest payout in game-show history.
But the numbers weren’t so hot for the network. After opening on Sept. 9 with 6.5 million viewers â€" not bad for a summer fill-in, not good for a heavily promoted “event†billed as a landmark in the convergence of broadcast, online and social media â€" the show lost viewers nightly, dropping to 3 million by the end of the week. It rebounded slightly this week, reaching 5.4 million for the two-hour finale. But it definitely wasn’t the resounding conversation-starter NBC was looking for heading into the fall season, unless you mean the conversation about why the show didn’t work.
In the “Million Second Quiz†spirit, here are four thoughts about the show’s problems. Feel free to choose (E) All of the above.
A) Confusing: This has been the buzzword throughout the run of the show, which met the need for a steady stream of new contestants in various ways: you could come to Manhattan and camp out at a pop-up game-show shantytown, waiting in line for a chance to be a “challenger,†or you could play the online version of the game to qualify for a spot as a “line jumper†flown in from home. This was not actually that confusing if all you wanted to do was watch the quizzes â€" as a viewer, you didn’t need to know where the players came from. But if you wanted to understand the entire mechanism or take a shot at getting on the show from home, the available information, particularly on the show’s baffling Web site, was sketchy at best.
B) Dumb: Not every show should be “Jeopardy!,†but really, the name of Kim Kardashian’s cat? The person who officiated at Patrick Stewart’s wedding? Trivia at that level of banality is no fun to watch. To be fair, the championship match included questions about Thomas Jefferson and the Civil War â€" along with the cost of Super Bowl tickets and what the comic-strip character Cathy did in her last strip.
C) Nothing New: One of the features NBC aggressively promoted as a new digital-age wrinkle was an app that allowed viewers to play along with the game during the live broadcast, comparing their scores to those of the actual players. But we’ve been doing that for as long as there have television game shows â€" if you want to get us on our phones and tablets during your broadcast, you need to offer more than that. Which leads to …
D) NOT REALLY “CONVERGENTâ€: The one authentic way for the public to engage with “Million Second Quiz†was resolutely old school: coming to Times Square and standing on the sidewalk. Beyond that, despite all the numbers NBC can throw at us â€" 1.5 million home players engaging in 28 million games â€" there was no sense of being a part of anything besides a big bump in traffic for NBC’s Web site. Beating a succession of random foes on your laptop or phone may have been satisfying, but it gave you an infinitesimal chance (if any chance at all) of appearing on the show. More than 400,000 players reached the qualifying score to be a line jumper. All you were really playing for was a spot on an online leaderboard, and the people there â€" like Bruce P. of Houston, the overall leader with 1,081,960 points â€" must have done nothing but play “Million Second Quiz†for two weeks.
It doesn’t seem as if it would be that hard at this point to design a truly convergent game show: one in which anyone and everyone who wants to could play against each other live, a million-player quiz rather than a million-second quiz. You would have to rethink the format â€" maybe Ryan Seacrest stands in front of a huge bank of monitors, and maybe players have to go to designated studios around the country rather than play from their living rooms. But we should be able to do it. We have the technology, right?
