Million Dollar Minute, Hot Seat and Family Feud are crucial to the success of channels 7, Nine and T

IT is buzzers at 20 paces as Channels 7, Nine and Ten gear up for war with Million Dollar Minute, Hot Seat and Family Feud.

Forget the 7.30 reality stoush between My Kitchen Rules, The Block Triple Threat and I’m a Celebrity ... Get Me Out of Here!

Instead, the most hard-fought TV battle of 2015 will be between rival quiz shows. That is because it is these early evening programs that play a huge part in determining each network’s ratings fortunes for the night.

The Project has been on a ratings rise since Ten took a chance on reviving Family Feud with Grant Denyer at 6pm starting last July. Ten would love that trend to continue now that it has signed Waleed Aly to host The Project alongside Carrie Bickmore and Peter Helliar.

After a slow start, Seven has gained traction at 5.30pm with Million Dollar Minute, hosted by Simon Reeve, which is now locked in a fierce battle for supremacy with Hot Seat.

Seven’s state news chiefs have no more excuses for any ratings shortfall for their 6pm weeknight bulletins. Million Dollar Minute is providing very solid lead-in figures.

Nine started its ascendancy in its 6pm news ratings thanks to the strong performance of Hot Seat, hosted by Eddie McGuire, which has screened at 5.30pm since 2005.

When Antiques Roadshow aired in the 5.30pm timeslot, Nine’s news was on the ropes.

“The lead-in to the news is obviously very important,” McGuire says. “The success of Hot Seat has been huge in helping Nine’s news, there’s no doubt about that.”

The thinking is this. Get your early evening quiz show right and you help news/current affairs ratings. Get your news/current affairs right and the rest of your evening’s programming has best chance of success. Viewers will hopefully flow from one program to the next.

That is why it was such a big gamble for Seven to launch Million Dollar Minute in September 2013. The show, which replaced the once-successful Deal or No Deal, was a Seven original. That made it an unknown quantity for audiences.

Million Dollar Minute stumbled early when original host Denyer left the show after two months citing “family reasons”.

Replacement host Simon Reeve, who had fronted kids’ quiz show It’s Academic, was thrown in at the deep end.

“There were no guarantees of Million Dollar Minute working as it has,” Reeve says. “It is a long, hard road for sure. There is a lot riding on it — with the programs and setting up the night.

“The big thing about these (early evening quiz) shows is that they are like putting on a comfy old jacket. They have to feel right. That process takes a long time.

“What you are asking of the audience is to be part of what is happening around the home at that time of night.

“That is a big divide to cross. We weren’t saying ‘you know the show’ like Family Feud or Hot Seat. With us it was ‘here’s this little show called Million Dollar Minute and hang around because we think it has got something in it’.

“I think we’ve crossed that divide. People accept the format now and accept me as host of it and now it becomes an arm wrestle (with Hot Seat).

“Now we’re saying ‘we’re here and we’re not going anywhere’. We’ve done enough to earn our stripes and we’re a player in the game now.”

The beauty of quiz shows is that you can tweak them. The half-hour Hot Seat evolved out of the longer-format Who Wants to Be A Millionaire which debuted on Nine in 1999.

Seven has tinkered with the Million Dollar Minute format, adding $75,000 and $300,000 safety nets to encourage winning contestants to keep on playing.

“If you call the show Million Dollar Minute then viewers want to see people playing for a million bucks or near enough,” Reeve says. “We’ve had three $500,000 winners now — Dougal Richardson, Jonathan Maher, and Pierre Sutcliffe. The audience love to invest in that journey.”

Family Feud doesn’t worry about paying out big dollar prize money and it is a format that is nearly 40 years old in Australia. Hosts of past incarnations include Tony Barber, Daryl Somers, Bert Newton, and Rob Brough.

That hasn’t fazed Aussie viewers who have embraced the reboot on Ten, but it did give Denyer a few sleepless nights.

“The fact that it (Family Feud) was an ‘old favourite’ was scaring me because that cannot always be successful,” Denyer admits.

“When I did my first audition, though, I felt that there was still something quite relevant about the format.

“I reckon it (Family Feud’s success) is because it doesn’t make any promises. The prizes aren’t record breaking. It’s not intelligent comedy. It is just a good simple bit of harmless fun. You’re watching real Aussie families and you’re watching it with your family.

“It tries to cater to everybody. I can’t believe how young a lot of our audience is. Kids play it in the playgrounds at lunch time. I’ll be stopped at road works and the guy holding the stop sign will say ‘mate, I just want to tell you I love your show’.

“Young, old, men, women, it doesn’t matter. It seems to work.”

With nearly a decade in the 5.30pm slot, sheer longevity is probably Hot Seat’s biggest challenge but McGuire is confident that it will prosper for years to come.

“Because some of the formats are old doesn’t make any difference — it is about good ideas,” McGuire says.

“People like Hot Seat because there is a beginning and an end every half-hour. The questions come thick and fast and showing the four potential answers means that everyone can try and figure it out.

“Viewers also invest in the contestants — liking them and hoping they win or not liking them and hoping they lose.

‘People love quiz shows. They always have and they always will. You’ve got Family Feud doing really well … Million Dollar Minute is doing well … and Hot Seat is barrelling along beautifully.

“It is great to see the networks doing locally-made shows and people enjoying them.”

Million Dollar Minute, Channel 7, weeknights 5.30pm

Hot Seat, Channel 9, weeknights 5.30pm

Family Feud, Channels 10, ONE and Eleven, weeknights 6pm

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