Tense and generally entertaining (Who Wants to be a Millionaire?)

Member Name: Burning_Darkness

Product:	Who Wants to be a Millionaire?
Date:	04/11/09 (16 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: engaging, tense, some challenging and interesting questions

Disadvantages: can get repetitive, Chris Tarrant can start to grate

Hugely successful and with numerous different versions going around the world, 'Who Wants to Be a Millionaire' is a quiz show in which there is a lot of money at stake, as the title would suggest.

Using their own consoles, ten or so contestants must first try and arrange a number of items into a particular order, eg chronological order of events or the like, in the initial 'Fastest Fingers First' round. The quickest contestant to get the test right is then selected to take part in the main game, whereby they must choose the right answer from one of four choices, the amount of money starting low and subsequently doubling until the sum of a million pounds is reased (assuming they get that far).

After a few initial easy questions they soon become rather difficult, and contestants can choose to either take the money they ahve already won or to risk losing everything and continue. They also have 3 lifelines, allowing them to ask a friend for advice, eliminating 2 wrong answers or polling the audience on waht they think is the right answer.

The show is engaging and the questions genearlly challenging and intelligent, and its certainly a very tense experience that has a habit of sucking you in whether you like it or not. Chris Tarrant can become somewaht irritating after a while, and the show does get repetitive, but its nevertheless an interesting and engaging high profile gameshow nevertheless, and one that is fairly stripped-down and straigtforward, with none of the unneccessary complication of other prime-time quiz shows like The Weakest Link.

Summary: A decent prime time quiz show