“Michael McIntyre’s The Wheel”, or How I Stopped Caring And Learned To Love The Wheel
“This is insanity! We could be here, forever!” cried out Michael McIntyre as Andy from Lincoln answered that “Roxanne” by The Police repeated its title less than “Shout” by Lulu and the Luvvers.
This occurred eleven minutes into the third episode of The Wheel, where the previous ten minutes of the wheel featured the following events:
- A contestant wheel was spun, determining the first contestant to be Andy
- Andy chose the category Pop Music, and selected to “shut down” Judy Murray
- The Wheel landed on Judy Murray, eliminating Andy
- The contestant wheel was spun again, determining that Andy would get a second chance at the question
- Andy selected the category of Pop Music again and again selected to “shut down” Judy Murray
- The Wheel landed on Judy Murray a second time, eliminating Andy again
- The contestant wheel was spun a third time, determining that Andy was to receive a third shot of answering the pop music question
- Andy again chose the category of Pop Music, and selected to “shut down” Judy Murray.
After eleven minutes of “gameplay”, the Wheel was no closer to ending than it was before the title credits rolled — and I much like host Michael McIntyre, was beginning to fear that I may be here, forever.
The Wheel in terms of format is sort of a participation trophy version of Who Wants To Be A Millionaire? as a group of three contestants need to answer seven questions from seven different categories. One contestant at a time is determined to be the “active contestant” who will choose a category and will spin a wheel of celebrity guests to determine who will aid them in answering the question.
One celebrity guest is deemed to be the “expert”, and landing on them will net an additional 5,000£ to the jackpot, and one celebrity is chosen by the contestant to be “shut down”, and landing on them will count as if the contestant got a question wrong before the question was even asked. If they manage to avoid landing on a “shut down” celebrity (roughly a 6/7 chance), they will be given a multiple-choice question.
If correct, they will clear the question and will be allowed to stay on The Wheel. If incorrect, they will be relegated to the contestant wheel — where one of the three contestants (including the person just eliminated) will randomly be determined to become the new active contestant.
Eventually, one person will answer the seventh question and will be able to attempt the eighth question — where they will have the ability to select to receive aid from either the strongest celebrity guest (for half the jackpot), the most average celebrity guest or the worst celebrity guest (for double the jackpot). Whoever gets the eighth question right, wins the jackpot.
There’s a lot of things that just do not work about the show. There’s very little incentive to getting early questions correct — as the “winner” of the show is just the person who was selected by the contestant wheel as close to the end as possible. Celebrity guests range in usefulness from Astrophysics PhDs answering questions about Space to Love Island rejects answering questions about Irish Geography. All questions must be answered, so the gameplay in itself can take anywhere from twenty minutes to four hours based on the contestants' luck and trivia knowledge, making the pacing of all six episodes feel ridiculously uneven.
Contestants can show up to just be immediately eliminated based on a wheel spin, and contestants can show up just for the final question, for the chosen celebrity to tell them the answer and win it all. The amount of “undesired outcomes” are so plentiful, the chance of a regular game of The Wheel occurring are minuscule.
In that one episode alone, Andy selects the category “Pop Music” four separate times and on three of those times spun the “shut down” celebrity, giving him only one chance of contributing to the game when he got the Roxanne question incorrect.
In another episode, one of the contestants is never picked by the contestant wheel — never even having a chance to contribute to the jackpot prize.
Heartbreakingly, one episode of the show features a man chosen by the contestant wheel at the beginning to answer six correct answers in a row, only to spin a “shut down” celebrity on his final spin, eliminating him from the game. Only for a woman to then be chosen to answer the seventh question, effectively setting her up for victory.
However, in a The Wheel-first, she then gets the final question wrong, enabling for the initial question answerer to have a chance at winning it all, only for him to also get it incorrect. Furthermore, when the third contestant was given a chance — making her first appearance on The Wheel in the entire episode, she also got the final question incorrect, meaning that this episode of the wheel had no winner, much to Michael McIntyre’s chagrin.
That’s when I realized — The Wheel in Michael McIntyre’s The Wheel isn’t just the wheel that celebrity panelists sit on, nor is it the secondary wheel that contestants sit on eagerly awaiting their chance to take on the questions, it is the boulder (or wheel) of Sisyphus. The cursed King of Corinth, forced by the gods to eternally push a boulder up the hill, only to have to do it again, forever a symbol of humanity’s hubris and a symbol of useless and endless work. And then I started liking the show.
If the COVID-19 pandemic has proven anything to us, all of our systems are inherently broken — with random chance determining our place in life more than any other thing that we can control. If our systems of government are broken, shouldn’t our game shows be as well?
Watching Michael McIntyre’s The Wheel is somewhat a celebration of the broken systems we live in. It doesn’t matter the skill of the contestants, all seven questions will be answered correctly by the group — whether it takes five minutes or five hours.
Sure, the winner is largely decided by chance, and questions exist purely as a façade of consequence, especially when questions are multiple-choice and most successful runs are ended by a spin of a wheel. The game show is Keynesian make-work of a quiz show, more of a cost to the greater television landscape than the entertainment it creates. Michael McIntyre’s The Wheel is a show that exists because game shows are cheap, people like celebrities and The Wheel enables said celebrities to stay two meters apart at all times.
But you know what? Quiz shows ARE cheap, people DO like celebrities, and after everything that we’ve gone through over the past year, it’s comforting that lighthearted entertainment will persevere. Whether it’s the seated celebrities dance and sing-a-long to the uptempo theme tune or a contestant explaining to Chris Kamara what a prime number is, The Wheel does deliver on the “moments” that it sets out to achieve.
If I were to give a review to Michael McIntyre’s The Wheel, I would compare it to the bus replacement service of light-hearted entertainment, you don’t know how long it’s going to take, some decisions made seem to be illogical, but at the end of the day, most of the time, you get to a rough approximation of where you were supposed to go. Add in a catchy theme tune, strong production design, and the chance of ridiculous results, I would say that I could not stop watching The Wheel. However, whether or not I’m going to remember that I watched every episode of it a month from now is questionable.
Michael McIntyre’s The Wheel: 2/5
