Lately, there have been a rash of reality competitions that take elements from the Peacock hit The Traitors. In a new Hulu reality competition, ten reality stars and ten regular joes are locked inside a mansion. If they manage to escape when given a chance, they get a share of a $1 million pot. Or they can wait and split the pot at the end of the ten day competition.
Opening Shot: “We’re about to see a game play out,” says host Simu Liu as we see a massive mansion at night. “Twenty strangers trapped in a house for ten days, with a money clock climbing to one million dollars.”
The Gist: In Got To Get Out, hosted by Simu Liu, twenty contestants are trapped in a sprawling mansion for ten days. The only indication of a passage of time is a “money clock” that counts up the amount of the pot of money available. Every day, a randomly selected group of contestants get an “escape plan” from a ticker-tape machine in the mansion’s library; it tells the contestant which window or door will unlock, and where the money clock will be when it unlocks.
The contestant then has to choose whether to make their escape when the door or window unlocks. If they manage to exit the open gate about a quarter-mile away, they get to keep that money and the clock resets to $0. They can also choose to share that money with an accomplice. But if the other housemates get wind of the escape, they can throw an alarm switch that’s located on a watchtower, and if a contestant hits a red button on the first floor, the gate closes. If it closes before the escapee manages to get through it, that person has to come back to the mansion and the clock keeps ticking. The clock can go as high as $1 million. Whoever is left in the house at the end of the ten days will split what’s in the pot.
Ten of the 20 contestants are reality stars: Cynthia Bailey, Demi Burnett, Val Chmerkovskiy, Clare Crawley, Rashad Jennings, Susan Noles, Omarosa, Spencer Pratt, and Kim Zolciak-Biermann. The other ten are everyday folks, though it does seem that some of them have reality show experience. In the first episode, the four people who get exit strategies are also presented a key to a high-powered sports car parked outside, which can help speed their escape — if they know how to drive them.
What Shows Will It Remind You Of? Got To Get Out is the latest in a line of Traitors-like reality competitions, though in this one there’s more than one contestant lying at any one time.
Our Take: There’s an inherent silliness to Got To Get Out that the show’s producers try to embrace, mostly through Liu’s narration. Among the cast of reality stars are some of the most notorious villains in the genre’s history — like Omarosa and Pratt — so seeing them interact with each other will always be fun, because none of them can really be trusted. Pratt alone is as goofy as he’s always been, parading around in t-shirts promoting his wife Heidi Montag’s concert tour and trying to overhear conversations like he’s executing a CIA spy operation.
There will be challenges that might provide contestants some advantages, but the first episode was straightforward. Those who knew when there would be an opening had to decide whether to take advantage of it or not. Given the length of the driveway leading to the front gates, it seems that an escape is exceedingly difficult, but for the show’s sake, we hope that someone does make it out, and we hope that the money clock is in the mid-to-high six figures when that happens.
One thing we wish the producers did in the first episode was give us a little bit more of an introduction to the “normals” in the cast. It felt like they leaned heavily on the reality stars and the few “normals” who got escape plans to contemplate. Perhaps the plan is to integrate some of the non-stars into the narrative of subsequent episodes, and we do admit that a montage where the reality stars complained about the tiny closets and beds was funny. But there needs to be more of a balance going forward.
Sex and Skin: None.
Parting Shot: An escapee makes their way to the gate, while the rest of the housemates scramble to push the button to close it.
Sleeper Star: One of the contestants is named “Doodles” and he says he’s a toy designer. That’s not exactly true, and we like the fact that he’s trying to lie his way past veteran reality liars like Omarosa.
Most Pilot-y Line: The rules regarding using an accomplice and how the money gets split at the end are a bit murky, even with an explanation narrated by Liu halfway through the episode.
Our Call: STREAM IT. We enjoyed Got To Get Out because it’s not taking itself very seriously and its casting directors did a good job of bringing in reality stars that we love and/or love to hate.
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.