Banijay Entertainment, the company that owns beloved television formats like Ninja Warrior, Pointless, and Survivor, has added a new format to their portfolio: the game show Scrambled Up.
Because America hasn’t annoyed the world enough.
Scrambled Up is a word game in which four contestants attempt to solve slowly-unscrambling puzzle before each other. Like a mix between the newspaper jumble and Wheel of Fortune‘s Toss-Ups, players buzz-in when they think they can unscramble the puzzle. Each misplaced letter in the word has a different background color, and once a letter is in its proper place, it lights up green red. The host, the energetic and charming Michael Yo, reads out clues to assist.
As per usual for Keller/Noll’s shiny floor formats, the first two rounds are irrelevant and low-scoring, and the final round is the only round that mathematically matters. Brace yourselves for the final round—the player must solve 3 puzzles in 60 seconds or less to win $10,000. Quelle surprise. I hesitate to call that final round a “bonus” round because if you don’t win the $10,000, you seem to also leave with nothing, which, to be honest, feels insulting.
I’d love to be wrong about that. I don’t think the producers intend to insult their audiences or their contestants. But it seems as if syndicated game shows are increasingly treating contestants like cogs in a machine instead of the stars of the show (as they rightfully should be). The television industry is dealing with diminishing returns in an economy that is making game shows less valuable to advertisers and therefore harder to make for producers. Those with innovative, fresh and engaging ideas are fighting for scraps while CEOs rake in millions for fostering an entertainment landscape that devalues anything but formulaic, milquetoast, hackneyed, lowest-common-denominator dreck like Scrambled Up, which is so efficiently produced it can poop out 8 episodes in a single fucking shoot. At the end of the day, the ledgers are in the black, the YouTube comments are positive and the audience is by and large enjoying what they’re watching, so what the fuck do I know?
Banijay will shop this format and others at MIPCOM Cannes, an annual trade show for the television industry, later this October. Scrambled Up’s second season is syndicated nationally, on YouTube and has a 24/7 channel on Samsung TV Plus in the US and Canada.
