NBC created this series exclusively for the purpose of providing an easy target for Saturday Night Live.

<small>oh, and Anne Robinson is a cyborg

Technically, NBC didn't create the show, it's yet another British import.

I think I like this show. Any show that strives to humiliate a person on national TV has to have at least some watchability.

but are you watching the show? She's rude, yet amusing. I like it.

Marcus...

There's no crying in game shows...!

Is the host smacking him or what?

And are these the most stupid people in America?

This program is a sado-masocist dream...

I enjoy the show myself.

Renee: "I was cheated out of a lot of money."

Um, uh, by your own brain. Moron.

Do they force the contestants to act like petulant children when they lose?

I didn't much care for it. The host was annoying, everytime she said "weakest link", rushing through it real quickly I felt like strangling her.

The attitudes of people were stupid too... just made everything seem too childish... picking on people for missing questions in their post-banishment interviews, rude comments when voting, etc.

How long before the phase "You are the weakest link" gets old? Why can't our people come up with creative game shows instead of ripping off other parts of the world(in this case the UK!) I know that both "Who wants to be a Millionaire"(getting really old now) and "The Weakest Link" are rip-off from the United Kingdom!

I have not seen any of it yet as I'm om PST!! But I already dislike the show and it's host!The host is all over TV,She's been on "Inside Edition","ET", "Access Hollywood",&"Today" to name a few places I've seen her! I wonder how long before this show gets old and goes away?

Caught about 20 minutes of it while procrastinating during finals for school. Like every game show ever created it is just idiotic, I never understood the appeal of watching other people win money. If this show is a big hit there is something seriously wrong w/ society. The show has a arrogant brit calling americans stupid b/c they don't know there T.V. trivia, contestants are considered dumb b/c they don't know the name of an actress on Frasier -rolleyes-. I know to each their own but how on earth is a show like this entertaining to people.

Why not say instead it's another show we ripped off from another country instead!?

I like how the guy gets a simple Lethal Weapon question, and the lady gets a question about what book Salmon Rushdie wrote.

I enjoyed the premiere except for the whiny babies they recruited to be on the first telecast. The British episode I saw in October didn't have as many whiners.



JoeC

[Edited by JoeC on 04-16-01 at 07:36 PM]

Please post "Spoiler Tags" so the people on the board who live on PST can enjoy it too!Thanks for ruining it!

LOL. That's the funniest thing I've read in awhile.

Renee was totally dead weight. How many times did she stop to ask the host to repeat the question? She acted like British English was some bizarre language that she simply could not understand.

Those post-game interviews were lame. I felt like I was watching Jenny Jones with all the people "talkin' smack" about each other. The rest of the show was pretty interesting, though; it definitely picked up the pace and held my interest.

I apologize for perhaps spoiling the end of the show for some people, however, it is never good form to include the spoiler in your complaint about the spoiler because it means that the chance of spoiling it for other people increases...even if I correct my original post.

Not everyone is out to get you.

JoeC...not perfect by any means, but I will always correct my own mistakes...

That was my only complaint with the show, as well. Obviously the producers told the losing contestants to be rude and nasty in their comments. Either that or they're just sore losers.

I swear this thread wasn't around... i looked and looked...

anyway...

the phrase: "theweakestlink" bugs me most... can she not say it any faster? :rolleyes:

This show is theweakestlink of NBC's nightly lineup.

</small>Well, I don't know if I buy your theory, but you're right: SNL's gonna have a field day with this silly show.

<small>(I'm kinda diggin' it, in a please-don't-tell-anyone sort of way...)</small>

[QUOTE]Originally posted by adamblast

Quote:

---

Originally posted by stevevt
NBC created this series exclusively for the purpose of providing an easy target for Saturday Night Live.

SNL's gonna have a field day with this silly show.

---

Can you imagine SNL Celebrity The Weakest Link (like Jeopardy)? That would be great.

Or better yet, how about a real Celebrity The Weakest Link? That would be really embarassing for the celebrities that leave early ... -smile-

Correct me if I'm wrong but I think Wednesday's edition, the contestants will all be from the cast of Survivor. I thought that's what the preview said.

Also, was anyone else bothered by the "da da dumm" sound everytime the clock started. Bugged the sh!t out of me.

Did anyone else notice the idiots that kept saying "bank" when there was no money to bank?

I think 'Greed' was still the best of the new age game shows.

By the way, that old lady on 'Weakest Link' was NOT funny. She was having trouble reading the questions and the pacing she was reading them at made them fairly hard to comprehend. And her insulting the team for how much money they won got old after the first time she did it.

It was okay. I think it will be better once more money is at stake. $73,000, while a good chunk of change, isn't $1,000,000. I think the more money involved, the more cutthroat it will get.

That was the stupidest group of people I have ever seen on a trivia type game show. Those idiots would not even make it to final Jeopardy.

I like the SNL theory.

It was like watching the bastard child of Survivor and Who Wants to Be a Millionaire.

I liked the relatively rapid question rounds, but then they spend as much, if not more time on the idiotic voting. I had the closed captioning on while playing some CD's and when I turned the TV sound up at the end I realized the host speaks...extremely...slow.

I'm sure, at some point in the development of this show, someone pointed out that this show is too derivative (sp?) of the whole "reality/game" show trend. And I'm sure the person that made said point was promptly relieved of his/her position for *gasp* maybe suggesting doing something original.

It's all a big game of copycat, and NBC decided it doesn't mind copying CBS and ABC at the same time.

UK perspective
 

I've never watched the show all the way through but sometimes see the last few minutes when I get home from work. Here are some factoids (some of which may be slightly misremembered!):

Anne Robinson is being paid over a million dollars for just 13 US shows. <i>(Money for old rope. Who cares if it bombs!)</i>

She was taking elocution lessons so that Americans would have less of a problem with her accent. <i>(I never get this problem people have with accents. I understand all accents that are thrown at me; even easier if the person is fluent in your mother tongue. All you need to do is <b>listen</b>!)</i>

The average UK prize money is around £2300. <i>(That's about $3,500; 5% of the US prize.... Hello!!)</i>

Certainly in the 70s and 80s the vast majority of UK gameshows were styled on US originals. <i>(So, sorry for all those that deplore the lack of homegrown talent, but we are just getting you back or Wheel of Fortune and Celebrity (Hollywood?)Squares!!)</I>

<IMG SRC="http://www.dvdtalk.com/forum/images/smilies/tongueold.gif">

[Edited by benedict on 04-17-01 at 12:23 PM]

In all fairness, though, if you only saw the last round, it was quite different from the previous rounds. In the last round, there was no time limit, so she read the questions much slower. Most of the time she was pretty fast, with the exception of the "Treaty of Guadalupe..." question; she read that question slower than molasses, because she was probably afraid of screwing up the name.

The ones people asked her to repeat were ones she gave right after they said 'Bank' (guess they weren't expecting the question to start right away), or ones where the question was something like "What 'P' stands for a ..." or "What 'G' did this or that" (meaning the answer starts with that letter). I didn't understand them either on the first read because the sentence ends up sounding kind of awkward. Out of I think 4 or 5 questions that were phrased like that, I think only 1 of them didn't ask for it to be repeated.

I didn't quite understand the rules about banking. How far along in the reading of the question was it still okay to say "bank"? One guy said it when the question was about a third of the way asked, and it stil counted. Also, why didn't anyone ever say bank when it bacame their turn with very little time left? Wouldn't it make sense to say "bank" when you knew you didn't have enough time to answer the question? It seemed like no one ever did that.

Accents aren't usually that big a deal, but the ticking-clock aspect of the game makes any small glitch a big deal... Her unusual speech patterns (to the American ear) and the odd wording of the questions (ditto) will take some getting used to.

I agree that the "What P" or "What G" kind of question was messing people up. That form may be standard grammar on UK game shows, but it hasn't been used here commonly.

It may take several episodes for the program's style to settle down. In the meantime, the participants will be goofing up due to unfamiliarity as much as the usual ignorance and panic. :)

We can at least be thankful that "Richard from Survivor" wasn't chosen for the host -- he was under serious consideration for a while. Yuck.

Any UK experts correct me if I'm wrong...

They're supposed to say BANK right away, but when the hostess is in speed-talk mode they're going to be lenient unless it's obvious that the contestant was trying to hear the question before deciding. Also, contestants don't know the information we see on our screens, like the exact question values or remaining time left. That's why you get so many people trying to bank non-existant cash, for example.

And while it'd be smart to bank often at the very end, I expect it'd be nearly impossible to estimate time accurately during the adrenelin rush of a round.

Ok, that does make sense. I didn't realize that the contestants could not see the remaining time.

Um...I'm pretty sure that the contestants know that when the person before them answers a question wrong, the bank is at zero. It is idiotic to say "bank" right after someone gets a question wrong. This happened numerous times on last nights program.

I would imagine that the pressure and intensity of being there answering questions on the spot would cause someone to think less clearly than they would watching at home, leading to some "idiotic" mistakes. But that just might be me.

I thought that the high school kid James played pretty good. It was cold when Mary and that Undertaker dude voted him off just cause he was a kid. He was the strongest link in that round yet he lost cause of the other people being babies.

Looks like the show could be around for a while. According to EMOnline, the it won it's time slot, the first Monday 8-9pm victory for NBC since March of 1999 (over 2 years). It also showed a 73% increase over the previous week's Dateline NBC, and had a healthy adult 18-34 rating. NBC is also considering Richard Hatch to host a syndicated version of the show they hope to launch for the 2001-02 season.

Click the link above for more info on the show's performance last night.

Both the questions I think were fair.
There were four Lethal Weapons movies so far but the correct answer is 3 sequels. I think under pressure, one could have answered this question wrong. With the Salmon Rushdie question, you either had to know it or you didn't.

I liked this show very much. The host's cracks at the contestants are funny as hell and quite witty in that British dry humor way. It won its time slot and should be do well if NBC doesn't move it around too much or air it too often. Goodbye!

She has the coolest accent.