The Cutprice Guignol

A zeitgeist game show set-up, one of the biggest names in British TV as a host, and a primetime weeknight slot – how exactly did The Genius Game end up one of the most spectacular flops of the year so far? Let’s get into it!

The ITV game show The Genius Game was originally adapted from a South Korean series 더 지니어스 (The Genius), which ran for four seasons between 2013-2015 – gathering together a dozen or so contestants, the game put them to the test in a series of challenges designed to test their mental and social acumen. Contestants would be eliminated after each round until only one was left standing, wherein they’d win the coveted title of “The Genius” and, more materially, a fat stack of cash to boot. After a few accusations of manga plagiarism, the original version of the show was cancelled in 2015 – a Dutch version was briefly trailed in 2022, but only lasted a single season before it was swiftly hustled off the air again.

Which brings us to the British localization, released just a couple of weeks ago in a weekday evening slot on ITV. With competition TV having a bit of a moment in the UK right now, it’s not hard to see why the British programmer was so keen to find a game show to match its competitors. From the water-cooler hit of The Traitors to the BBC’s Race Across The World (which The Genius was in direct timeslot competition with), high-concept game shows with a focus on social strategy as well as more structured gameplay.

David Tennant, one of the most beloved faces in British television and beyond, is an undeniable get as the host – as one of the most beloved faces in British TV and beyond, it wasn’t hard to see why ITV built so much of the marketing around him, all the promo images for the show seemingly featuring Tennant waving his hands around in a one-size-fits-all mysterious pose hastily photoshopped into an abandoned Crystal Maze set. Throw in a handful of contestants with existing media status such as comedian Ken Cheng and former Miss England winner Bhasha Mukherjee, and ITV looked to have a hit on its hands when it aired the first episodes back-to-back on concurrent evenings at the start of this month.

But…oof. The show kicked off in a primetime weekday night spot, but pulled in just over a million views; for reference, Race Across the World, which began its fifth series around the same time, reported 3.1 million viewers tuning in during the same time slot. Within just a couple of weeks, The Genius Game had been bumped down from twice a week to once, with views dropping precipitously with every episode – now unable to even pass a million views, with the most recent episode barely making it past 700,000. But how exactly did this show, which looks to be such a hit on paper – tapping in to game show trends and hiring one of the biggest names in television to host – end up flopping as badly as it did?

Well, I’ve taken a look at the first few episodes, and I have a few ideas. If you’ve been around the Guignol for a while, you’ll know that I am a big fan of David Tennant in the vast majority of his work – from Doctor Who (which Genius Game is desperately trying to invoke with the set-up of the main central room, right down to the hexagonal cutouts on the wall) to Good Omens to Broadchurch, I truly do rate him (enough to sit through nonsense like Inside Man, which is really saying something) as an actor and as a personality as a whole.

And with that said…this might be the worst I’ve ever seen him. Tennant appears as The Creator, a mysterious figure intended to guide contestants through the task from afar – afar being the operative word here, as Tennant appears almost exclusively in the show via TV screen. It’s the same set-up the original version of the show used, with the person pulling the strings observing from the other side of a camera, but here, it totally strips Tennant of one of the best parts of his on-screen presence: his ability to bounce off people.

It’s no coincidence that so many of his best and most iconic performances come as part of a double-act: from the Doctor and Donna, to Crowley and Aziraphale (and let’s not forget him and Michael Sheen in Staged, either), to Alec Hardy and Ellie Miller in Broadchurch, Tennant always seems to sing when he’s got someone to It’s not even just that he’s not in the same room as the contestants that’s the problem, though, make no mistake, it’s part of it – it’s that he so clearly recorded all the inserts months before the show even went to shooting, the contestant’s named ADR-d in clumsily after the fact. I would have loved to see Tennant take on a more Richard-O’-Brien-in-Crystal-Maze role, running around these sets and bantering with the contestants, but he functionally amounts to Jigsaw’s puppet for most of his screentime here.

But what of the actual show itself? I’ve seen some complaints that the show’s games and set-up are too complicated – but, this is the genius game, after all, so shouldn’t we be expecting something with a little more intellectual bite? Look, I don’t think it’s that Genius Game is so sensationally clever and fiendishly complex that it’s just too smart for most people, but the show seems to lightly convolute the explanations and gameplay to give it all a more intellectually-stimulating feel than it actually has. Given the success of Only Connect, a British game show that has run for twenty seasons and seems entirely based on the premise of making me personally look like a drooling moron, it’s not like there isn’t an appetite for genuinely tough challenges on British game shows, but this feels rather a smug attempt to seem exceptionally clever than anything else. It strikes this uncomfortable middle ground between the social strategy seen on shows like The Traitors and more straightforward intellectual challenges, where neither really feel like they have a chance to take the front seat.

Add to that the cheap-looking production, with graphics lifted straight from an educational CD-ROM that my mum stuck me in front of as a kid to keep me quiet for an hour and a half, and a thundering lack of chemistry between contestants, and the failure of the show makes rather more sense. The games are neither compelling enough nor the social strategy fiendish enough to justify its own existence – and, with ratings dropping week after week, it seems spectacularly unlikely that a second season is on the cards.

With that said, I would love to hear what you make of the show, if you’ve seen it – why do you think it’s been such a flop so far, and is there any saving it? Let me know in the comments below!

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(header image via Variety)