What a stupid name for a show. Who doesn’t want to be a millionaire? The only people I can think of are billionaires, and they’re too busy spraying poor people with hoses and using Gray Poupon. Is that reference 20 years too late? Oh well, “Family Guy” made it in the last 5 so I’m willing to stick with my guns. This show, to my knowledge, was the one that really brought the prime time game show back on the scene. And like its many predecessors, it ran itself into the ground and now resides solely on daytime television where Bob Barker left a wasteland of unwatchable garbage.
You're GARBAGE!
Host Regis Philbin (who recently retired from being annoying on television) asked questions of varying difficulty to people and somehow struck gold. I wonder if old gap tooth himself Michael Strahan could do this show and make it a hit again?
Probably no. He already awkwardly fills this seat.
We started with the citizenry polling on that new-fangled internet to try to get a free trip to New York and not even have a guaranteed spot on the show. Once you qualify to sit on the stage, you now have to earn your way into actually playing the game. That’s kind of the scary part of the show; if you get a run of people getting like $5,000 and leaving, a few people can play in a night. If someone went on a run, then 9 other people wasted their time for 2 seconds of television time and a day off work. So essentially they lost money. Not only that, you had to bring people with you to ask questions to if you needed help. So you wasted their time even. That freakin’ Regis and his controlling behavior ruining lives.
Once you got on the show, you should have at least nailed three questions. Even if you don’t know anything, you have life lines to make some of that money.
1. You could poll the entire audience for the answer. I don’t think I ever saw anyone get screwed here, but that’s an awkward rest of show if they do and then join the audience.
2. You could phone someone at home and hope they got it right. I’m sure in today’s version they just let the use Wikipedia instead of making someone at their house do it.
3. Our third life line gives you the option to take two of the four answers away. This one burns people the most because it gives them a false sense of hope.
Who the hell needs lifelines?
If these life lines aren’t needed, John, we clearly had a smart cookie on our hands. Probably a Fig Newton. If you can guess from the title, someone that gets all of the answers correct wins a whole million dollars (after tax)! It happened a mere 11 times and America loved it up until 8ish. The very first one (old John Carpenter from above) was awesome because he used a life line to call his Dadto tell him he was about win a million dollars. Talk about hubris. If he blew that question he would still be getting razzed by bad comedians on VH1.
That's not even walking around money to Regis
“Who Wants to be a Millionaire” was really just a more dramatic version of Jeopardy. It was more dramatic because of camera angles, stage lights, Regis Philbin trying his best to rattle cages and a much higher stake. The program started running seemingly every night though and finally America’s final answer was that they were sick of the show. They were ready for a mean British lady or a bald comedian making people open up briefcases. It was very weird. Go figure we stole something from the Brits and ran it into the ground. Right John Krasinski?
