With tiny beads of sweat affixed to their upper lips, NBC execs are anxiously awaiting word that 18 to 49 year olds, clad in corporate casual khakis, are congregating around water coolers reciting, “You ARE the weakest link. Goodbye.”
It all started about two years ago when ABC and Regis Philbin, in his snappy sateen suits, innocently asked the country, Who wants to be a millionaire? Several months later, CBS and Jeff Probst, wearing Banana Republic attire circa 1986, invited 15 hard-bodied Americans and Richard Hatch to an island in the South China Sea.
Suddenly, the power of NBC, the station that had reigned the airwaves since Hill Street Blues, had been usurped.
To recapture its status as the highest rated network, NBC needed a hit. However, rather than coming up with an innovative concept or new trend, NBC has opted to follow in the footsteps of its usurpers and has simply borrowed an already established British hit.
The Weakest Link is basically a hybrid of Millionaire and Survivor. Eight contestants stand in a semicircle around the show’s much-hyped host, Anne Robinson. They contestants play as a team in seven rounds of rapid-fire questions. Robins asks general knowledge trivia like, “What star of the movie Dead Ringers and Lolita can also be found in print ads for Donna Karan?” If a question is answered correctly, the team accumulates money towards a collective pot. If a question is answered incorrectly, the pot goes down to zero. At the end of each round, each contestant votes to eliminate the person they perceived to be the weakest link. In the final round, the two remaining players battle it out in a best-of-five trivia contest. The person who wins takes home the pot (the money the group earned over the course of the seven rounds); the loser leaves with nothing.
After each player has been voted off the island, as it were, they give an exit interview where they bad-mouth the players that voted against them. For instance, when Kira, a bartender on the premiere episode, was voted off after the second round, she said to the camera, “When I realized I was voted off it made me very, very angry because all of those people are losers.” This is, perhaps, the most disingenuous element of the show. It’s hard to believe that the rejected contestants really feel what they say. It’s not like they’ve been living on an island together where they are forced to eat bugs. They’ve spent a couple of hours in a climate-controlled television studio playing a game show. How can they have possibly formed such extensive opinions of each other? The exit interviews, however, are not theLink’s ultimate selling point. Anne Robinson, the caustic inquisitor – imported from London – who takes time out to berate the contestants at the end of each round, is supposed to be the show’s major draw. NBC hopes that her excessive rebukes will appeal to American audiences’ insolent tastes like they do to the Brits. (According to an acquaintance in London, British viewers “can’t wait to hear what [Robinson] says next.”) Unfortunately for NBC, Americans, especially those who live on the coasts, don’t really need a game show to witness a grouchy matron deride the public. All they need is to ride the subway, shop at Macy’s or visit the witch who lives underneath me after I accidentally drop something like a toothbrush on the floor. They’ll get all of the nastiness they’ll ever need. – JoAnne Steglitz