Where's my million?

Wheel of Fortune has endured a couple of close misses on the million dollar prize recently. The big cash is insanely hard to win, so the misses should hardly come as a shock. But the agonizingly close calls have set off alarums and excursions on the game show Interwebs.

Case in point: this thread at Buy a Vowel. The original poster dismisses the million dollar prize as a "gimmick" and suggests getting rid of it entirely. Other posters bat around ideas on the big money, with no overall consensus.

My heretical notion is that the near misses are a feature, not a bug. A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, I estimated the chance of winning the million as 1/600 per episode. This looks fairly accurate now. It was always apparent that Wheel had set up a brutal obstacle course between contestants and the top loot. One Buy a Vowel poster puts it this way...

I'm pretty sure Sony considers all publicity as good publicity. Positive or negative, all that matters is that people are talking about Wheel.

Yeah, that's the idea. One odd note: another poster in the thread opines that Millionaire "has been dying since 2002." Wow, that's a long drawn-out death. As I wrote in a previous entry, Millionaire may actually meet the reaper after this season. But seventeen seasons look like robust health compared to the frantic life cycles of most TV shows.

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