There’s a new trend in game shows lately, where getting the wrong answers can be rewarded as much as getting the right ones. First, there was the flawed but entertaining Bullsh*t The Gameshow, and now there’s a game where a contestant can cheat on every answer and still win.
Opening Shot: Scenes of the first season of Cheat, with hosts Danny Dyer and Ellie Taylor good-naturedly calling contestants “Lying little weasels” and “absolute scumbags.”
The Gist: As Dyer says, Cheat (or, as it’s stylized on the show, Ch£at) is “the only quiz show where you can cheat your way to a fortune.”
Each contestant gets four questions in a round, presented to them on a tiny screen. If they don’t know an answer, they can hit a button that gives them the answer. Correct answers build the pot — £1,000 per right answer in the first round, and £3,000 per right answer in the second round — while wrong answers cost the same amount to the pot. In each of the first two rounds, the other three contestants can push a different button to indicate that they think the person who answered the question cheated.
At the end of the first round, the most accurate “cheat hunter”, i.e. the player who caught the most cheaters with the least mistakes, moves automatically to the next round. They also get to pick who gets eliminated. A twist gives them more information in this regard: Money is deducted for every cheat, so if the person eliminates the most prolific cheater, the money for those cheats and their wrong answers go back into the pot.
The second round is structured a little differently; if a cheat is called out, it’s immediately revealed if a cheat took place or not. No money is added to the pot for a cheat. If a cheat isn’t caught, the money earned during the cheats is taken out of the pot at the end of the round. This makes the best cheat hunter’s choice for who goes home more strategic: Add the most money back into the pot, or eliminate the better player?
In “The Final Cheat,” the amount of the pot that’s been built to that point is up for grabs; questions keep getting asked and answered until someone gets something wrong or someone accuses the other contestant of cheating. If the person being accused is caught cheating, the accuser wins. If the person being accused wasn’t cheating, the accused person wins.
What Shows Will It Remind You Of? Cheat is somewhat similar to a previous Netflix game show, Bullsh*t The Gameshow, though in that one, the contestant answering the questions doesn’t have a cheat button, and he/she has the other three figuring out of they’re lying.
Our Take: Like Bullsh*t The Gameshow, Cheat has a simple premise that’s bogged down by complex gameplay. The premise is: You get to cheat, and the other contestants try to figure out if you cheated. But because of the way the money is handled, things get way more complicated than they need to be.
It also doesn’t help that in the first round, Dyer, who seems to be more the comic relief than anything else — Taylor and her more gentle Aussie accent, asks the questions — digs into why people hit the button that accuses the person answering of cheating. He’s doing it to bring out the contestants’ personalities, gently gibing with them as most game show hosts in this era do, but all of that seems like filler to us.
It’s fun to see who the cheaters are, and which cheaters have the best poker faces. It’s entirely possible for someone to win by cheating their way through most if not all the questions. It’s also fun to see both hosts calling the contestants names; it’s especially funny coming from Dyer and his gruff, working-class accent.
Some of the questions are a more UK-centric, but most of them are universal enough that even colonialists like us can play along.
The contestants are game, and they banter with the hosts and each other well. But there isn’t a whole lot of tension, even in the final round, and the money at stake isn’t enough to lend that final round a boost of tension just by showing how much is at stake.
Sex and Skin: None of that, of course, but there is some salty language.
Parting Shot: We see scenes from the first season of the show.
Sleeper Star: Jess, one of the contestants in the first episode, was quick with the explanations and quips. Maybe she should host a show.
Most Pilot-y Line: When someone accuses someone else of cheating in the final round, Dyer asks if someone used “the c-word.” It’s supposed to be a cheeky reference, but it’s not.
Our Call: STREAM IT. If the subsequent episodes of Cheat pick up the pace a bit, it should make for a good show, despite the overly-complicated money rules.
Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.