If nothing else, “Power of 10,” the new sort-of quiz show on CBS, is an opportunity to ponder the question of why Drew Carey has become America’s go-to game-show host.
Mr. Carey, who is marking time here until he succeeds the sainted Bob Barker as host of “The Price Is Right” in the fall, does not fit the traditional molds. He doesn’t project the practiced blandness of Mr. Barker or Pat Sajak, the cocktail-hour camaraderie of Richard Dawson or Gene Rayburn, the professorial waspishness of Alex Trebek or Anne Robinson. Built like a refrigerator, buzzing with nervous energy, punctuating his own jokes with a high-pitched staccato giggle, Mr. Carey is no one’s idea of a comforting presence.
But in this era — the post-Trebek era, I’d call it, even though Mr. Trebek is still around — when hosts are allowed to telegraph, however subtly, their contempt for the contestants and their boredom with the proceedings, Mr. Carey really is a throwback.
Unlike his current prime-time rivals Howie Mandel and Bob Saget, who keep contestants at arm’s length, Mr. Carey, the nerd from Cleveland, has a strained sort of empathy. He’s one of us — much more successful than we are and happy if we know it, but too cool to rub our faces in it. Apparently what America wants in a game-show host right now is the guy at the college reunion who sold his tech start-up at the right time.
Back to “Power of 10.” Despite the current fad for onstage crowds — 26 models holding suitcases on “Deal or No Deal,” a “mob” playing against a contestant on “1 vs. 100” — the number in the title doesn’t refer to people. It indicates that the prizes for each round of the game grow by a factor of 10, in five steps from $1,000 to $10 million. In last week’s premiere game, Jamie Sadler, a 19-year-old college student from Upper Montclair, N.J., walked away with $1 million.
The fast pace and potentially huge prizes work for the show. Working against it, for me at least, is the fact that it’s more of a guessing game than a test of knowledge: contestants are asked to predict what percentage of an undefined “national polling sample” said yes to questions like “Have you spent more than $100 on a pair of jeans?” or “Is it acceptable to break up with someone by e-mail?”
Questions with a little social or political spice are mixed in, like what percentage of American women consider themselves feminists. (It’s 29 percent, according to the show, and Mr. Sadler’s guess of 23 to 33 percent won him the million dollars.)
Guessing along with the contestants is mildly diverting, but the real interest of the game lies in the queasy-making decisions that its exponential progression — and the difficulty of gauging public opinion within ever-shrinking margins of error — are guaranteed to generate. In the two games following Mr. Sadler’s big payday, contestants with $10,000 in hand went for $100,000 and lost, meaning that they walked away with a measly thousand. Let’s hope CBS put them up in a nice hotel. (For a true gut check, pay close attention in tonight’s episode to the numbers, and the faces, when the question involves girls playing football.)
In the meantime, I wouldn’t hold my breath waiting for someone to walk away with the top prize. How often is a contestant going to risk a guaranteed million on what, by the game’s arcane rules, would amount to a 1 in 11 chance at further riches? Even Drew Carey would have a hard time talking me into that.
POWER OF 10
CBS, tonight at 8, Eastern and Pacific times; 7, Central time.
Created by Michael Davies; Mr. Davies, executive producer; Vincent Rubino, co-executive producer; Drew Carey, host. Produced by Embassy Row in association with Sony Pictures Television.
