They're only giving it 4 weeks to start.. (and they're putting it up against DoND, which has basically beaten every GS put against it). Interesting that a miss on a passed question doesn't lower the prize money- so there is some strategy here..

Nine couldn't make a go of it with Millionaire as a weekly in primetime, in that rather nicely-done 90-minute live version, which tacked on the 16th question for $5 million. What makes them think a slapdash bastardization of the format will be successful against the Almighty Deal? The fact that the jackpot's 5x bigger? We saw how that went with $1M WOF...

Maybe because it'll move faster and thus be more "exciting"...I'm guessing.

This is roughly that Italian spinoff, right? I don't know if it'll hold up against the well-done AUS "Deal," but I'd be interested to see it.

A commenter on Buzzer posted the "Conditions of Entry". Page 5 is the money tree. The other interesting note (imo) is that there are 30 episodes planned as opposed to the 20 stated in the presser.

That money tree stinks- You'll probably see a ton of 1K winners, and maybe one 50K winner (in the Italian version- they used the normal shows tree, with the milestone at 3000 Euros and a last five of 30K,70K,150K,300K,1M- the highest anyone got in the special version was 150K, which would be 50K here).

Unless you get a John Carpenter-type player who can run through the stack without a lifeline, DoND will probably give away more money without having to do anything special (but they might run a Double Deal week- two $200K cases, like they did against the first week of MDWoF)

Carpenter was good but not great. He was the fortunate beneficiary of a distinctly easier set of questions. Whether that was accidental or something TPTB did to try to get somebody to win is something we may never know. But there are plenty of examples better than Carpenter of superior players.

small correction: towards the end of the run, one contestant did win the 2nd top prize
http://www.cinetivu.com/programmi-tv/quiz/...o-diana-vaturi/

Now in Italy the show is back to the original format, except there's no fastest finger round (like in the USA) and they're back to the three original lifelines (no more switch).

Isn't kind of hard to say someone's better than another with this format? I'm not arguing that Carpenter's questions (especially Number 13 on Religions) weren't easier, but you seem to say that he couldn't answer tougher ones, which seems presumptuous.

Why do I think they might try and do this here, in a possible ABC revival? Just a gut feeling for some reason...

I'd have to imagine that Davies is looking at this for a companion piece to the syndie Mil....fresh material would be better than double pumping the run as it stands in most markets....