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Pop Quiz ShowWhy ABC's Duel is painful.

By Troy PattersonPosted Wednesday, Dec. 19, 2007, at 4:21 PM ET

With Duel—a quiz show debuting this week in a regular run at the family hour and set to climax next Sunday—ABC offers the latest word in prime-time guessing games. It sounds an awful lot like the previous few words on the subject, Are You Smarter Than a Fifth Grader? and Deal or No Deal and The Weakest Link and the Regis-lubricated smash that begat them all, Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? About 7 million people have been tuning in each night. Who are they? And how do their brains respond to Duel's variation on a very particular set of stimuli?

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Once again, the set seems to have been fashioned from materials gathered at a junkyard that's been selling the USS Enterprise for parts. Once again, synthetic instruments gasp and pound in order to provoke a simulacrum of high suspense. Once again, fierce house lights alternately bathe the studio audience in ruby red, as if its members are being kept toasty in an especially lurid rotisserie oven, and in cobalt blue, as if they're floating in some drug kingpin's home aquarium. The graphics rely heavily on brushed metal.

In the twist that gives the show its title, contestants face off, one on one, to answer multiple-choice questions. Duel permits the competitors to choose their answers multiply, too, though there are reasons why this can be disadvantageous, and you really don't want me to get into them. In their quest for novelty, the makers of Duel have yielded to the great temptation of the new game shows, confusing tortuousness with intricacy and devising a complicated rulebook, quite possibly in the expectation that the viewers will be sufficiently amused by trying to figure out what is happening or so confused that they dare not change the channel until they've sorted it all out.

The questions range from not idiotic to respectably noggin-scratching, with a noteworthy number involving vexillography, which maybe lends the proceedings a cosmopolitan flair. Relatively few questions dally in celebrity culture, and those that do involve an extra degree of difficulty: Which of these persons has not been married to a platinum-selling recording artist? And do you know what color George W. Bush's eyes are? How far away can a mosquito detect your presence? Or why do contestants on shows like Duel persist in being shocked that the most suspenseful moments will be commercially interrupted?

The host, ESPN's Mike Greenberg, keeps things moving along competently enough, though his physical appearance (long sideburns, vague neckties) only enhances the feeling that the show represents something of a nostalgia trip to the fairly recent past. He is abetted by two mute young women in cocktail dresses—"chip girls," they're called—who could stand to gain 10 pounds each.

What I would give for just one Vanna White! The problem with the new game shows is not their stupidity, though that can be an obstacle, but their impersonality. The harsh lights and severe sets and robotic soundtracks never fail to transform these affairs into gladiatorial spectacles, great jolts of extra-caffeinated cola. If a cozy cup of tea is more your taste, you will still need to get set earlier for Ms. White's abiding Wheel of Fortune and Mr. Trebek's human-scaled Jeopardy!

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Troy Patterson is Slate's television critic.

COMMENTS

Remarks from the Fray:

I don't get how you can call the game "complicated", unless you think no game show should be more taxing than "Deal or No Deal". It's very straightforward:

1) Two players start with 10 chips.
2) You each answer the same series of multiple choice questions with 4 answers. You secretly use your chips to choose as many answers as you want, even all four.
3) You lose all chips you place on wrong answers.
4) Once someone does not place a chip next to the right answer, that player loses.

You have as much time as you want to answer each question, except twice per game your opponent can "Press" you, forcing you to finish answering within seven seconds.

The four players who win the most duels are going to the finals; ties are broken by who wins the most money (paid out at a rate of $5k per chip you have left at the end of the game).

What part of all this confuses you? Heck, I jumped in the middle of the show; they never even explained the game to me and I got it.

Complaining about the set design seems, well, pointless. Who cares, it's just about the least important aspect of the show. The only thing important about a game show is the game. The game needs to be good, and it needs to be the focus. I think where Duel drops the ball is, the focus is bad.

The pace is slower than it needs to be. They've fallen into the "Deal or No Deal" trap of having each contestant have their own little "gimmick", being labeled by their occupation rather than their name (e.g., "The Telemarketer", "The Cabbie" or "The Stuntwoman"- didn't they cancel "Identity"?), And they're all crying or doing the tomahawk chop or thanking sons or fathers or dying patients. Look, no one tunes into a show called "Duel" for the human interest stories, OK? Just play the game and move it along, please.

None of these long drawn out pauses to build "tension" either; I'm so past over that. I'm completely Brechtian on this now. Let the moment be what it is. Don't waste my time manipulating me into feeling tense. If it's tense, I'll feel tense. That's how that works.

--howlless

(To reply, click here.)

(12/25)

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