At 8:15 last night, Pro-7 (a commercial network here in Germany) started up their game-show "Schlag den Raab". It's an odd show featuring a host (Stefen Raab) and a guest. There's roughly ten challenges, and at the end....someone goes home with million or so. Last night's episode involved 2.5 million Euro.
It's safe to say from the thirty-odd choices from the evening....Pro-7 is always lucky if they get into the top four shows. With last night's show, they drew a market share of roughly 22-percent, which means a ton of Germans tuned in and watched the show. Typically....this live show runs for about three hours....sometimes a little bit longer.
Well....last night, the show finally ended at 2:22 AM, it finally resulted in a winner. Yep, it ran for more than 360 minutes or six hours (if you prefer).
What the German analysts say is that some of the challenges of the show simply didn't go as well as planned....thus taking longer. And the last challenge simply didn't work.....and folks discovered that Pro-7's production team didn't ever have a plan-B in their mind for a live-show and if a challenge simply could not work.
In this case? They finally concluded the episode and Raab lost.
German TV folks (both state-run and commercial) do a fair amount of live-production TV. I'd take a guess that during an average week.....discounting sports events....there's probably forty hour of live shows a week. Some are interview or forum type.....some are game-shows....and some are variety-hour type (like the old Ed Sullivan Show). A plan-B mentality? No. I've watched at least twenty odd shows where something went wrong, and it was clear that plan-A was going to scrapped.
Back in the summer.....the state-run TV crowd ran a variety show in the middle of the day with some challenge involving chilli-peppers. The TV host got involved.....got himself into some pretty harsh peppers, and basically had to leave the live-show for a local hospital. One of the guests got suddenly drafted....handed a live-mic and proceeded to carry out the rest of the show. In the US.....most VIP guests would have freaked out and walked way saying it wasn't their job. In this case, the guy did a four-star job and proved that he had an enormous amount of talent.
Will Pro-7 review the show and the results? Maybe. But they had an all-time high number of people to watch, and it might turn out the same way for the next such show. So maybe.....just going for the gusto and skipping a plan-B.....might be part of plan-A.
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