There’s no ‘lock it in Eddie’, so how does the new Millionaire Hot Seat stack up?

Millionaire Hot Seat ★★½

Free-to-air TV may be on the decline, but there’s one honoured genre that has been around since the very beginning that simply refuses to die. Not the news, soap operas or talk shows, but the venerable quiz show.

They come in various forms, formats and styles, but one looms large among the many. Who Wants To Be A Millionaire? landed with as much thunder and lightning as any TV show can generate when it premiered in 1999 in Australia. Big, noisy, headline-making “event TV”, it took the basic elements of the quiz show, turned the lighting and music to 11 and welded elements of nerve-wracking tension, jeopardy and game-show theatrics to a format that until then had more closely resembled a sedate academic IQ competition.

Millionaire, its streamlined spin-off Millionaire Hot Seat (aka Hot Seat) and host “lock it in Eddie” McGuire have been fixtures of the Nine Network ever since. But the era quietly came to an end late last year when it was announced Ten would relaunch Millionaire Hot Seat with a new host. As the new quizmaster, veteran actor Rebecca Gibney was an unexpected but inspired pick.

For starters, this slimmed-down, half-hour version does away with the Fastest Finger First segment that opened the show when it last aired. For newbies, that is the pulse-quickening “play along at home” warm-up in which the six contestants answer multiple-choice questions covering a broad range of general interest topics. The person first to the buzzer with the highest number of correct answers gets first turn in the hot seat and, most importantly, the lifeline that allows them to call a friend, have four possible answers reduced to two, or opt for a new question.

Ten’s version opens with one of the contestants already in the hot seat ready to bat away questions and work their way up the money tree to the elusive million-dollar jackpot (which, it’s worth noting, only six contestants have won in the Australian versions of the show). To stay on the show, they must answer the question correctly or take a pass and relinquish the seat to the next in line.

It’s largely up to the genial Gibney to keep the show moving. She’s something of a natural as a quiz show host, equally adept at pleasant chitchat with contestants and amping up the tension as nervy contestants wait to hear if they answered correctly or are leaving none the richer. There’s hugging, occasional tears and poignant reminders that for many contestants, a cash prize several zeros short of the life-changing million makes a difference nonetheless. It’s not by chance that this Hot Seat airs straight after the relentlessly silly Deal Or No Deal.

This abbreviated and watered-down version of the show is also gentler on the ears and eyes. Gone are the constantly moving, neon-bright background graphics and pulsating drumbeats as a contestant locks in, for example, whether a “cordwainer” produces shoes, saddles, glasses or hats (it’s shoes, dah!). But it’s also a little bland, a lightning-in-the-bottle blockbuster — which the OG Millionaire most certainly was — stripped of its high-concept flourishes, a formulaic quiz show sticking to its basic outline.

But here we are 27 years after Millionaire’s birth with a spin-off back on primetime and a new host asking quizzers to lock in their answers. When it comes to Australian TV, it really is the case that the more things change the more they stay the same.

Millionaire Hot Seat airs at 7pm, Monday to Friday, on Ten.

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