Millionaire may not be the show it once was, but, for my money at least, it still beats the heck out of watching a sarcastic Brit yell at kids who can't sing.
Watch both tonight and decide for yourselves. The third of six Super Millionaire specials airs at 10 p.m. on The New VR and ABC, while American Idol continues on CTV and Fox at 8 p.m.
In the ratings, it will be no contest. Idol will romp with twice the viewers. Besides just being a much hotter show, Fox has it scheduled smartly at 8 p.m.
When Millionaire finally airs at 10 p.m. (it continues there Thursday and Friday), most of the kids who made it such a family hit the first time around will have already gone to bed.
ABC did well with it Sunday night at 9 p.m., where it scored 17.5 million viewers, good enough to be the highest-rated show of the evening and beat NBC's normally dominant Law & Order: Criminal Intent. Even better for ABC, against the finale of Sex And The City on HBO, Millionaire still won the night among the valued 18- to 49-year-old crowd.
The re-vamped game show, hosted by ol' smoothy Regis Philbin, started strong Sunday night with Washington, D.C., lawyer Todd Kim earning a $500,000 US payday.
Mr. Smarty Pants was the first player to advance through to the new "Super" round of Millionaire. He was cruising until asked to name the other aviator who was lost along with Amelia Earhart in 1937. Kim had to phone a friend to learn that Fred Noonan was the ill-fated navigator.
Does anyone else think that phone-a-friend should be called phone-a-friend with high-speed Internet access? ABC is missing out on a natural branding opportunity. Anyone typing "died with Amelia Earhart" into a Google search can give you the odds-on answer well under the 30-second time limit.
That answer was worth $100,000. Later, in order to win half a million, Kim had to ponder this: "In 1991, on what television series did the first network condom commercial appear?"
Who would know that? Kim had to turn to the "Three Wise Men," the show's newest lifeline, for the answer.
One of those wise men was no man but a lady, former Millionaire champ Nancy Christy. The only woman ever to win the million bucks, the Tulsa grade school teacher admitted to Kim that her answer, Herman's Head, was a pure guess. Although Herman's Head, condom ad ... you do the math.
Kim took a gamble and won, which is kinda ironic if you think about it.
Later, out of lifelines, he passed at trying to answer the $1 million question: "Neurologists believe the brain's medial ventral prefrontal cortex is activated when you do what?" The answer: "Get a joke."
Smart man. If he had missed, he might never have activated his medial ventral prefrontal cortex again.
