Been there, too

After I watched GSN's sneak peek of Minute To Win It, I felt like reprising my review of the network's Pyramid revival. Haven't we seen this before?

The show followed the NBC version slavishly. That's not a terrible thing, in my opinion, because I liked the NBC version. I'm a sucker for stupid human tricks, and the tricks on GSN's Minute were plenty goofy.

GSN even used the same voice synthesizer with the same cheesy British accent for the blueprints. The contestants, as on NBC, were state-of-the-art cute and chirpy. Well, the husband was chirpy. The wife was rather reserved.

The only big difference was the host. Apolo Ohno was not the wet blanket described in Hollywood Junket's preview of the show. He was warm and friendly enough, and certainly competent. Of course, he was pretty dialed-back compared to Guy Fieri, but aren't we all? One other difference: this was cable. The money was skimpier. But the cute couple went home with some cash.

I don't want this review to sound snarky. I enjoyed the show. But as I grumped about GSN's Pyramid, if you're just going to do the exact same thing as the original, why bother?

UPDATE: Futon Critic has posted the numbers for the Minute sneak peek: a rather unimpressive 452K total viewers but a much better (by GSN standards) 120K viewers in the 18-49 demo. The corresponding numbers for American Bible Challenge's season two finale were 960K total viewers (a big number for GSN) and 160K viewers in the demo.

Minute has generally skewed younger than GSN's other shows. That's relatively speaking, of course. Everything on GSN skews old. So even if Minute gets only rather modest total viewer numbers, network execs may still like the demo results.