It's an okay quizzer with some groaner humor. Nothing special but hardly an embarrassment. Except the numbers for the debut were beyond embarrassing. Nielsen says that only 159K viewers bothered to watch. truTV is far from a ratings juggernaut, but the audience was about half of what they usually get for their prime time reality stuff.
It's not like Paid Off lacked for pre-debut publicity. It's just that the publicity was all wrong. Instead of emphasizing fun and games, the rollout grumbled about "American inequality and political dysfunction."
Okay, that quote is from The Atlantic, and I'm not suggesting that game show fans spend a lot of time with that dour publication. (Does anybody read The Atlantic any more? I was a little surprised that it still exists.) But way too much of the publicity effort involved a lot of political complaining about student debt.
By the time the show debuted, people could have been forgiven if they expected to see a whiny millennial grousing that the taxpayers should pay off her absurdly overpriced Harvard degree in women's studies. Why, isn't that just what most folks tune into a game show for? So guess what. Hardly anybody actually did tune in.
The show is really more fun than the publicity suggested. (Thirty days in the hole would have been more fun than the publicity suggested.) And maybe any game show on truTV will face an uphill battle with the channel's usual reality junkies. But whoever designed the publicity push should get Paid Off...in Confederate money.
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