Would you send your grandmother over the side of a 10-story building for a chance to win $1 million?
Forget traditional game shows where contestants are cheered as they answer questions that test their knowledge and build up prize money.
The new trend in game shows circa 2010 is to penalize the losers — cruelly.
In a move that seems to echo the high stakes drama of the real world economic recession, new game show contestants are showered with gifts and prizes — then have it all painfully stripped away.
Instead of the victorious jackpot winner we are used to seeing on “Who Wants to be a Millionaire” or “Wheel of Fortune,” the game-show business is tempting viewers to watch the dejected loser who may have been so money-hungry as to send a loved one off the side of a building — on a giant conveyor belt, no less.
On “Downfall,” which premieres later this month on ABC, contestants frantically answer trivia questions as the clock counts down. Cash and prizes — everything from new cars to trips to Paris, as well as cash ranging up to $1 million — are placed on a conveyor belt which moves ominously toward the edge of a building.
If contestants fumble, their cash and prizes plummet 100 feet onto the street below.
Mercifully — or maybe unmercifully — there is an escape clause.
To slow down the belt, players have the option to “surrender a personal possession” — and risk losing a valued personal belonging. Or they can place a “friend on the belt” — and risk sending a friend or family member off the side of the building (wearing an decelerator harness “to soften the blow”).
And this idea that the humiliated loser may make for better TV than the happy winner of yore is not purely an American thing.
In Britain, the latest hot game show is called “The Million Pound Drop Live.”
Before the questions even begin, couples are given one million pounds in cash (about $1.5 million).
But the players have to place all or some of the cash on a trapdoor on the stage.
One wrong answer and the contestants are forced to watch their money drop into the abyss — to the apparent delight of TV audiences.
More than 2 million Brits are tuning into the show each week, making it the best performing show in its time slot.
In the show’s first run, only one couple walked away with dough — about $110,000.