UnListed

I finally got around to watching the one episode run of Fox's The Rich List last night, and while it wasn't the horror show I expected, I can't say I'm going to miss it.

I did like the premise - two teams of two strangers each "bid" on the number of entries they can correctly provide for a list (such as "Tom Cruise movies"). The team whose bid is accepted by the other team must then meet their bid. Failure to do so gives a win to the other team, the team that wins two out of three goes on to the actual Rich List, where for every three items they can name from a list, they get a certain amount of money (with an error earning you nothing).

So while the premise was fine, everything else was either derivative, actively annoying, or both. In the former case I'd put the set, the music, and the lighting, which was all taken from the new game show playbook of space age over-dramatic hyperkinetic nonsense.

Falling in the both category was the host and the contestants. The host, an Anglo-Irish presenter named Eamonn Holmes, had an Irish accent of someone who is trying not to have one. He'd have been better off in full brogue. His attempts to inject drama into the proceedings fell flat, though that was only partially his fault.

Which leads us to the contestants, who fall into that slightly dopey category that's all the rage now. This works on shows like Deal or No Deal because of the time spent talking to and working on the contestant. It's easy to milk drama out of contestants when you spend time messing with their head, and then introducing family, friends, and celebrities to do the same. When you've got minimal chatter along those lines, the dopiness of the contestants stands out. This is a problem when the show is more knowledge-based.

Anyway, if you didn't see it you didn't miss too much. Though it'd still be better than the continued foisting of The O.C. on the public.