One of the greatest feuds in TV history is the one between people on a trivia-based game show and the people at home watching that show. The people onscreen have every opportunity to get questions right and win money, but they lack the basic knowledge that everyone watching at home claims to have, resulting in a shouting match between the self-proclaimed geniuses at home and… well, nobody, because the people on TV can’t hear when you shout at them. But now NBC is looking to change that one-sidedness with a totally fresh concept it has only tried once before.
Variety reports that NBC has picked up a new game show based on the popular trivia app QuizUp for 10 episodes. The app allows players to challenge others’ knowledge on a huge array of subjects both broad (like “science”) and very specific (like “Nintendo 64 games”). The show will maintain this structure by having an in-studio contestant compete in eight rounds against eight different players at home, each based around a different topic. The contestant can win up to $1 million, and the people at home can win some smaller amount based on whichever round they competed in.
Oddly, Variety notes the QuizUp show won’t be live, but rather the “audience interaction has a live element with at-home viewers participating in the same trivia at the same time as in-studio players,” which doesn’t make any sense to us. Maybe the show itself won’t be broadcast live, but the people playing along at home will participate when the show is being taped? That sounds significantly less exciting than watching people at home literally playing along in real time, but whatever. This is NBC we’re talking about. It’s doing its best, and that’s what counts.