Never let it be said that the networks don't care about their viewers. As a public service to those few remaining individuals (about eleven at last count, and I think all of us work for this magazine) who haven't yet tapped into the vein of bubblin' crude that is the stock market, the powers that be have provided an alternative method for us to raise ourselves out of our currently deplorable financial circumstances and join the ranks of the filthy, stinking, keep-your-grubby-little-capital-gains-taxing-Demmycrat-hands-off-my-stuff rich. To wit, they've reintroduced the game show. On its face, this is not as empty a gesture as you might think. After all, TV people can and do fire damned near anything into the Magnavoxes across America, apparently having discerned that the viewing market isn't quite oversaturated with pitiable sitcoms about dysfunctional twentysomethings lamenting their inability to get laid in The Big City; or dramas about hyperdramatically dysfunctional teenagers lamenting their inability to get laid in Somebody-Get-Out-The-Effing-Map Small Town America; or poignant movies of the week about bloodied-but-unbowed baby boomers too busy to get laid because they're preoccupied with surviving the aftermath of some natural disaster, serial murderer, family tragedy, financial crisis, highway accident, tax audit or combination of all of the above. Or another Coolest Teenyboppers Ever And We Mean It Viewers' Choice Awards show. Or something exploding. (Tonight...When Nothing Particularly Eventful Happens XIV. Set the VCR. Tape over Baby's first steps. You need something to discuss at the water cooler tomorrow, don't you?) You see my point. Until now, we've had nothing to get our game show fix from except that legendary hour of bipolar intelligence, Wheel of Fortune and Jeopardy! But no more. In a typical display of its impenetrably vermin-like wisdom, ABC has come out with Who Wants to Be A Millionaire?, created in the time-honored American programming tradition of bogarting some old British show and sucking it dry of everything that made the original concept entertaining in the first place. Not to be outdone by the Mouse, Rupert Murdoch and the Bruces down the street at FOX have fired a counter-salvo with their own exercise in unrestrained avarice, called, simply, Greed. (One wonders when Ted Turner, the third member of this little global media troika-cum-pissfest, is going to get in the game. Although maybe not. After pouring a cool billion down the sinkhole that is the UN, Ted's gotten a bit stingy with his purse strings as of late.) While we're waiting for Ted to remove his cranium from his sphincter, let us compare the current offerings at hand. After all, Barron's magazine compares investments all the time, and by concentrating on a few control categories, we can arrive at a pretty good idea of which of these two methods of swag-bagging seems to be the more promising. Without further ado:

 

Category The First: FORMAT

Both shows operate in similar fashion. Contestants answer a series of broad-range trivia questions of increasing difficulty and monetary value. Get 'em all correct, and you leave a much more promising mugging victim than you came in. ADVANTAGE: Tie.

 

Category The Second: LEVEL OF DIFFICULTY

Both shows employ a multiple-choice format. (Which makes me long for the days of shows like The $64,000 Question, where either you knew it or you didn't, and none of this can-I-have-a-hint-please folderol.) Millionaire provides the standard A-B-C-D format, the preferred instrument of torture employed by educational systems across this great land, which if nothing else dredges up memories of how bad we all were at taking multiple-choice tests. Greed varies things a little. Instead of choosing the one correct answer all the way through, the questions change at the higher levels and ask for multiple answers. They also provide 6, 7, or 8 choices to tax your mental faculties. In short, Greed makes you feel as if you've really earned your dosh. ADVANTAGE: Greed.

 

Category The Third: HOST

Having desired to be a game show host since I was four years old, I consider myself a connoisseur of the theory and practice of giving away startling quantities of cash. This is how I view this subject. Simply put, the game show host is a facilitator. He moves the game along efficiently, makes the contestants feel right at home (that is, if their home decor consisted of rows of blinking strobe lights, TV monitors, money tote boards, bells, whistles, sirens, and about 450 strangers sitting in stadium seats in their rec room), gives out the money or not as the case may be, but in effect he's just doing a job. A job I'd kick orphaned kitties out of the way to do myself, but still just a job. If the host becomes a star, he does so because the game's a hit (call it the Sajak Factor), not because he's the nexus of the program. Greed is hosted by Chuck Woolery, a true veteran of the game-show world and a trusted and multifaceted personality. He's one of the originals, whose name is mentioned in the same hushed tones as Bob Barker, Alex Trebek, Bob Eubanks, Richard Dawson, Monty Hall, Wink Martindale, and the rest: a true member of the pantheon. He's hosted the original, pre-Vanna Wheel of Fortune (yes, there was such a thing, and if you don't remember it, you're probably too damned young to be on the 'Net anyway. How'd you get past the FretfulCyberParent block on Mommy's AOL account, anyway? Those things are supposed to be foolproof), as well as Scrabble, Love Connection, the fifth or sixth incarnation of The Dating Game, and probably your local 6 AM news show. He's comfortable, old-shoe, familiar. You trust Chuck Woolery with this kind of cash. Millionaire, on the other hand, starts Regis Philbin. Whom I wouldn't trust to give out sums as small as those on the payroll accounts in Kathie Lee's sweatshop empire. ADVANTAGE (by a long shot): Greed.

 

Category The Fourth: CONTESTANTS

Millionaire has one contestant at a time going for the cash. Greed, however, has teams of contestants playing for the money, and equitably distributing the wealth among the team members. This smacks of Godless Communism in my book. Moreover, teams are chosen at random (so you have no idea just how stupid the person sitting next to you is), and a team "captain," also chosen at random, is invested with a level of decision-making power that Captain Queeg didn't come close to on his best days. The captain gets the final say on every answer that every team member gives. He/she can accept or reject any and all answers, can change any answer given, and can even decide on behalf of the team whether to go on or quit the game. (Watch for signs that the game's going badly if the team leader starts rolling two steel marbles in his/her hand.) ADVANTAGE: Millionaire.

 

Category The Fifth: THE SET

OK, both shows, like any trivia game worth its salt, employ the standard tension-building music, whose vaguely Hitchcockian tone, meter, and rhythm is designed for no other purpose than to break the contestants' concentration. The millennial-era game show set, however, has come a long way from its predecessors. Apart from shows that are so old (like The Price is Right) that their sets are hip again in that beleaguered retro way, the newer generation of game show sets eschews the standard fare -- isolation booths, podiums with oversized buzzers, manually-operated category boards, staggering amounts of neon, etc. -- in favor of a more Fritz Lang-ish look of abstract scaffolding, large girders, a very minimal amount of buttons/switches/levers, and that evocative feeling that the set builders went on strike halfway through the process. Not like the old days, I'll tell you. Take a gander at the old show Bullseye someday. Neon and strobe lights out the yin-yang. My eyes couldn't focus for a full hour-and-a-half after watching that show. At any rate, Millionaire has the contestant and good ol' Reeg sitting rather comfortably in facing chairs, each with a small HDTV monitor in front of them to read the questions, and with the million dollars they're trying really hard to give away (if only they could find smarter contestants) sitting in this hermetically sealed Plexiglas box between them. Just the essentials. Here's the questions; don't kick the boxful of money. Nothing overdone. But no sense that this is a big deal, either. They could have high tea with the Plexiglas box as a coffee table and it wouldn't seem out of place. Greed places each of the team members inside partitioned booths (I hesitate to call them "isolation booths" because they don't seem particularly isolating) with individual monitors, all controlled by the team leader and Chuck up at a central console. The set gives off more of a feeling of tension. It also gives off the feeling that Chuck and the team leader have the power to fill any or all of the booths with nerve gas if one of the team members punts a particular question. And I don't want some systems analyst from Greensboro, North Carolina who's just blown my answer off anywhere near the nerve gas button. ADVANTAGE: Millionaire (mostly for the nerve gas factor).

 

Category The Sixth: GIMMICKS

In this era of declining educational standards, game shows have, unfortunately, fallen in step. Millionaire employs an interesting twist. If contestants get stuck on an especially thorny question (e.g., What color is a red London bus?), they may use one of three "lifelines" to narrow down the number of choices: (1) One is the "50/50" option, where two incorrect answers are removed, leaving the correct and one incorrect answer on the board (e.g., (a)Not Red or (b)Red, You Cretin). (2) Another lifeline is the "ask the audience" option, where the contestant is allowed to poll the audience to see which answer they think is correct. Why any contestant with an ounce of self-worth thinks it necessary to take suggestions from a roomful of people who didn't have the requisite brainpower to actually make it onto the game itself escapes me, but there you go. (3) The third option is to phone anyone at all in the US and talk to them for 30 seconds to see if they know the answer. Nagging thoughts on this subject include: What if they're not at home? What if they're still carrying a grudge about the time you flushed their pet hamster down the commode when you were both six years old and they've chosen this exact moment, on live national television, to give you your comeuppance? Why don't any of these people actually phone an authority figure on the subject at hand? (Baffled about a question on the films of Clint Eastwood? Get ol' Dirty Harry himself on the line. I'm sure he'll be flattered.) And do you have to split the winnings? Greed, on the other hand, flirts with none of this nancyboy lifeline stuff. Not in the least. They have "The Terminator." Oooooh, this is fun. "The Terminator" picks one of the contestants at random, and gives him/her the opportunity to throw down with one of his/her fellow team members, in a head-to-head, one-question duel of intellect where the loser is kicked off the team and forfeits his/her winnings to the winner. The upshot of this is that the team can decrease in size and people can give in to their Darwinian impulses. Much better in my book. Lifelines, indeed. Pah. I got your lifeline right here, pal.... ADVANTAGE: Greed.

 

Category The Seventh: FILTHY, FILTHY, FILTHY LUCRE

So just how much can you get your sticky little fingers on in half an hour minus commercials? On Millionaire, obviously, it's one million dollars. Amounts start at $100 for the first question and increase according to some mathematical formula that is probably very simple (like doubling), but that escapes those of us who stopped paying attention in math sometime around quadratic equations (or as I used to call them, "Huh?"). Greed, however, starts at $25,000. The maximum value, at last count, was about $2.35 million, and evidently it can go even higher than that. Dollar amounts increase by about $250,000 a pop in the higher levels. (NOTE: The progression up the dollar scale is called the "Tower of Greed." That alone gets my endorphins going.) Another factor to keep in mind is whose checks you're actually cashing. Millionaire is on ABC, which is owned by Disney. You know, the people who felt it absolutely necessary to put the musical Annie back on TV. Greed is on FOX, which is owned by Rupert Murdoch. You know who Rupert Murdoch is. He's the guy who owns the Los Angeles Dodgers; who bought the Manchester United soccer team for a billion -- that's "billion," as in "too much damned money" -- dollars; who owns the Sun, the Daily Mirror, the News of the World and all those other British tabloids whose sole purpose is to provide their readers with pictures of naked nymphets on Page 3 but who still feel it necessary to show clandestine photos of the Duchess of York's fat behind on the front page; who owns entire cable networks in Europe, Australia, and a good deal of the Far East; who Jonathan Pryce obviously modeled his character after in the last Bond film; and who probably owns you and your mother. And he puts things like World's Wildest Jaywalking Episodes Caught On Tape on TV. Regularly. ADVANTAGE: Greed. ('Cause with that kind of resume, two mill is the kind of change ol' Rupe finds under his couch cushions. Disney's got that whole Jeffrey Katzenberg judgment to pay out. And I loathe musicals.)

 

Final Tally:

Millionaire: 2 Greed: 4 Ties: 1 Numbers don't lie, folks. Actually, neither do names. Who Wants To Be a Millionaire? smacks of indecision. (OK, if I have to, I guess.) Greed is, well, greed. And remember Michael Douglas' immortal speech from Wall Street: Greed is good. Now to figure out how to work that nerve gas button...