FRIDAY'S ESPRESSO - 14th April

The most followed newsletter about international formats

1. FROM SEYCHELLES TO THE GAS STATION: RATE THE DATE

Monday 24th April will premiere on the German channel SAT.1 the fun dating show Rate My Date, produced by DPU GmbH and distributed by RedArrow.

In each episode of this primetime format, the famous comedian and host Ralf Schmitz (see pic) invites a new singleton looking for love to select their dream partner from 10 candidates, with the help of family and friends.

After 6 entertaining “get-to-know-you” rounds that reveal everything about the candidates – from spicy secrets and daily routines to dress sense and character traits -family and friends pass judgement on the prospective partners, evaluating them separately from the singleton. 

They have to rate the suitability of the candidates using suitcases worth different amounts of prizes, ranging from a maximum of 25.000€ (a dream holiday to the Seychelles) to a cheap date with €1 (an ice-cream at the gas-station). Only when the singleton makes his final decision, he’ll find out where the journey will take him.

2. TIME IS THE KEY

MipTv is coming and companies start to present their format catalogues. Many of them are actually old classics, returning formats or, at least, already on air since a while, and we have already written about them (e.g. The Genius Game, Raise and Fall…). But two of them are relatively new and have the same element at the very centre of their concepts: time.

The first one is the Korean reality-game The Time Hotel, from CJ ENM. Ten participants enter a hotel where the only currency used is time: they are given special watches with 24 hours of “welcome time”. They can gain more time competing in games which require intelligence, physical abilities, wit and luck. But they must also pay their food and drinks with their own time as currency and those who are out of time are immediately checked-out of the hotel. The final survivor can win up to 300.000$.

The second one is the Japanese Recipe Roulette, by Tv Asahi. In this cooking/game show two teams of three people (with different cooking skills and experience—namely good cooks and bad cooks) compete to prepare a complete meal: an appetizer, a main dish and a dessert.

Each person cooks a part of the dish and also in this case the key factor is time, because the cooking time for each contestant is determined by the roulette wheel (7 minutes each, 5 minutes or just 1 minute). At the end of the show, the teams will be judged by food experts, and the better team wins.

3. FINNISH COMEDIANS ON THE MOVE

Combining travel with comedy show is a common operation, which usually works quite well. For example, the Channel 4 show Joe and Katherine’s Bargain Holidays follows the adventure of the 2 comedians having a holiday in and outside the UK with a very low budget (see Friday’s Espresso - 15th Jul).

Quite similar is the concept of Travel Battle, which premiered a few days ago on YLE Finland. Also here two famous comedians are going to face a weekend trip, but in this case there is a difference: one of them will have a budget of 1000€ and the other one of only 50€.

At the beginning of each episode the 2 hosts arrive at their destination, where they are faced with a challenge in which the winner gets the bigger travel budget, and the loser gets the smaller one. The hosts have no idea what the other one is doing, and they only get to see each other’s trip in the studio. Which is better: having money or having surprises? Unlimited options or creative solutions?

At the end of each episode the studio audience votes for their favorite trip to see who is the winner.