‘Perfect Score’ Doesn’t Deserve One
After the new Whose Line Is It Anyway?, The CW airs Perfect Score. It is an extremely odd pairing. While Whose Line? appeals equally to both men and women, Perfect Score goes directly for The CW’s female demographic.
Perfect Score, hosted by Arielle Kebbel, is a slightly classier version of GSN’s Baggage, which is appropriately hosted by Jerry Springer. Baggage has people reveal unsettling secrets, such as collecting an ex-lovers toenail clippings in an urn, whereas Perfect Score settles for using cheesy pickup lines and other gimmicks, such as having men dress up as superheroes and sharing their superpower. Unlike Baggage, contestants can win money on Perfect Score, but they have to compete for a date against their best friend.
On Perfect Score, the object of the game is to find the potential partner worth the most money. (The show can have two men competing for a date with a woman, but since this show appears to favor women looking for men this post will refer to the contestants as women and the potential partners as men for simplicity’s sake.) The show has every participant take a compatibility test beforehand, which is used to determine who is worth how much. The dollar amounts range from $1 to $50,000.
There are four rounds. Every time a man is eliminated from the group, both women lose his corresponding dollar amount, which is usually different for each of them. To start, Perfect Score splits the group of 10 men into two groups. The first five try to impress Contestant 1, one is eliminated, and then the process is repeated with Contestant 2. The second round has the two contestants take turns asking two men at a time questions. After every question one man is eliminated and more dollar amounts are taken out of play. The last round is where the gimmick of the night is revealed, which can be anything from the aforementioned superheroes to having the guys make out with mannequins. Then the girls decide together to remove a guy. The contests then have to choose from the remaining three men, which can lead to both contestants picking the same man. Whoever is not chosen, is told to sit down with the rest of the guys. Perfect Score ends with revealing the amount of money the guys are worth. The contestant who chose the guy worth the higher amount of money wins a date and the cash. If for some reason, both girls choose the same guy and he is worth the same amount of money for both of them, he gets to choose the winner.
At best, Perfect Score is a guilty pleasure. It appeals to the same people who follow the Bachelor and the Bachelorette. The show is the result of combining a dating reality show with a game show. Because there is money involved, Perfect Score will never be The Love Connection or as fun and wacky as The Dating Game, which to be fair came from the mind of Chuck Barris in the mid-60s.
Posted on July 24, 2013, in Game Shows, Network Television, Primetime, Reality TV, The CW and tagged arielle kebbel, baggage, game show, perfect score, reality tv, the cw. Bookmark the permalink. Leave a comment.
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