Game shows are a staple of reality television. They have an extremely broad appeal, reaching all different age demographics with all different interests. This genre of reality television also has a long history, dating back to shows like ‘Jeopardy’ and ‘Family Feud’ and predating the 2000s wave of innovative and cutthroat reality tv show competitions. It provides a safe and family friendly alternative to the edgier content of the early aughts. ‘Cheat’ is the latest iteration of the game show format. Part of the premise is similar to many other game shows: four contestants advance through three rounds of answering trivia questions. The glaring difference is that while the contestants are answering questions, they will have a cheat button concealed under a table that will give them the correct answer if they press it.
‘Cheat’ seeks to provide the best of both worlds. It’s a game show that adds a completely new layer to its concept. The layer is self-explanatory and in the title. It’s centered around a premise designed to allow and even encourage its participants to cheat their way to winning the ever-growing pot of money. This helps it distinguish itself from every single other game show. ‘Cheat’ mostly succeeds at providing quality entertainment, often leaning into the charisma of its hosts, the bizarre nature of its premise, and picking contestants with varied life experiences that add to the breadth to the interactions.
The Inversion of a Common Premise
The concept of ‘Cheat’ is in the title. Instead of suggesting its players to use their own wits to problem solve and answer questions, the show actively suggests for them to go against the usual rules of a normal game show. The other players have a chance to press a second button located on the side of their table if they think the player who answered the question cheated. At the end of every round, it’s revealed how many cheated answers there were, who cheated the least, and how the person who cheated the least gets to eliminate the person of their choice from participating in the next round.
This premise is executed fairly well. The concept is a really clever twist on what we’ve come to collectively expect from this genre of television. Unfortunately, that doesn’t always mean that the rules that are based around the premise makes sense all of the time. An example of this inconsistent logic is how the pot of money or earned points from answering the questions shrinks or grows every round. A thousand dollars is taken away from the pot for every answer to be revealed as cheated. However, eliminating each cheater adds a thousand dollars to the pot. Embracing both of these in the final product muddies the show’s ultimate point of view on cheating. Is ‘Cheat’ rewarding it or punishing it? Does it want its participants to ‘break the rules’ or does it want them to suffer consequences? Nevertheless, it carries out its central theme with enough cohesiveness to hold the audience’s interest.
An enormous highlight of this show are the people featured on the show. This can be discussed in two parts. The first part involves the two hosts. ‘Cheat’ is given much gravitas by Danny Dyer and Ellie Taylor’s various back-and-forths with each other. Dyer brings a very comedic energy to the atmosphere, creating a lightheartedness to the cheating element. This performance makes the cheating feel a little more permissible, like the audience is also getting away with something by enjoying it. Ellie Taylor (of ‘Ted Lasso’ fame) is more often the one who is repulsed by the cheating going on, often surprised that so many people would lie if encouraged to do so. This is a very purposeful yin and yang that balances out the viewpoints of the show and provides a very necessary balance. If only one host existed, there’d be too much of one viewpoint being expressed.
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The second part involves the participants. Every single participant has a unique personality that brings something as unique as themselves to the table. Particular stand-outs include the ever positive Obi, the observant lie-detector Jess, and the deceptive Yasmina. You can tell that the producers went to great depths to find people with completely different lifestyles and personalities to clash together on the show. Having this varying array of people creates plenty of unexpected twists and turns. It’s easily the most exciting and unpredictable part of the show.
Unpredictability is the Show’s Middle Name
The unpredictability is perhaps the greatest aspect of the show. The unique rules and regulations for how players progress each round, combined with the various amounts of different playstyles each person brings to the show creates episodes that are truly exciting. It’s hard to know which direction the players will progress in, and who will survive each round. The creators of the show makes this a huge part of its appeal: audience’s very easily get sucked into each participant’s personalities and character traits, and make assumptions based on that.
This is what reality television thrives in. A good reality television show humanizes its subjects, portraying them with real neuroses and strengths and weaknesses. All these things are laid out in order to get across the fact that we are watching real people with real psychologies that have specific ways they choose to problem solve. It’s the engine that drives the entire genre. This is on full display in ‘Cheat’ as well: when Obi is confident in his answers, other players are quick to call out his brashness. However, he consistently proves to cheat the least amount during that episode. Jess the school teacher had an incredible gut instinct when it came to liars on the show, but this instinct couldn’t stand up to Yasmina’s brilliant poker face when enacting her cheating. ‘Cheat’ makes it fun to get invested in who people are and how this carries them through the competition.
‘Cheat’ is absolutely worth the watch. While the rules are a bit unclear in terms of whether or not the participants should enjoy cheating, it’s bizarre enough by itself with enough talented people to be interesting. ‘Cheat’ is streaming on Netflix now.
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