Critics Slam Cowell's Game Show
Now that Simon Cowell has saturated the prime time talent show concept, he has quickly moved on to big-budget game shows in an attempt to corner yet another market.
It arrived on ITV1 on Saturday night in the form of yet another Ant and Dec vehicle, ‘Red or Black?’.
Having already gifted £1 million apiece to two lucky winners in the opening weekend shows, this week long marathon of inane guessing hasn’t won over critics and viewers also appear to be deserting the show.
Having slumped by almost 2 million viewers by its second episode, alarm bells must be ringing in the ears of ITV execs and advertising agencies up and down the country.
The premise is simple. Contestants must choose either red or black in order to pass to the next round. Yup, that’s it. Cue tumbleweed. Lots of it. Admittedly it does have a bunch of challenges, celebrity appearances and glitzy musical performances in order to pad the show out to 60 minutes (followed by a half hour results show), but in essence, that’s the programme.
The main ‘Red or Black?’ show raked in just 4.7 million viewers on Sunday, down from 6.6 million for the main show on Saturday night, whereas the results show lost 1.76 million after raking in 7.2 million the previous evening.
Adding further pressure on the show is the crippling reviews it has received from critics. Seeing through the paper-thin disguise of over-the-top production, Ant or Dec spluttering with laughter and the crow-barring in of B-list celebrities, reviewers have cast their damning opinions on the entire concept.
InsideIreland’s Lauryn Mann questioned the apparent re-hashing of the ‘X Factor’, especially with the appearance of Leona Lewis and dismissed the hype around the show as a fuss about nothing “as it fundamentally lacked a sense of identity and stimulation.”
The Guardian quite rightly picked up on the mandatory cliché use of sob stories, claiming that the show had resorted to “spoon feed[ing] emotion to the audience” including “sob story sound bites, mobile phone conversations” and “excessive use of Coldplay's ‘Fix You’”
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