Winning Lines (partially lost American adaptation of British game show; 2000)
Title card for the series.
Status: Partially Lost
Winning Lines was an American game show adapted from the British format of the same name. It aired on CBS from January 8th 2000 to February 18th, 2000, a day after it's official cancellation. The game show was created by David Briggs, Mike Whitehill and Steven Knight, and was originally gonna be hosted by Geraldo Rivera before turning it down last minute, making Dick Clark host the show immediately.[1] The game show was considered to be CBS's answer to ABC's success, "Who Wants To Be A Millionaire?", and aired 10 episodes, with one episode that never aired after the cancellation.
Format
The show had 49 contestants, each person being assigned with a number from 1 to 49. Fot the first round, Clark will asked mathematical question, and the contestants have five seconds to enter their answer on keypad. The six contestants who got the answer right will move onto the second round.[2]
The second round was called "Sudden Death". Clark will answer more mathematical questions, each of the numbers belonging to one of the contestants still playing. If one of the contestants answers correctly, the number belonging to the player is out, unless if the number belongs to the buzzer. If answered wrong, the buzzer is out. If no one answers however, the player with the number will still be out.[3] The last remaining contestant will recieve 2,500 dollars and move onto the bonus round, while the rest gets 1,000 dollars.
The bonus round was called "The Wonderwall". The remaining contestant will have to answer many questions as possible in three minutes. If the contestant gets a correct answer, they'll receive more money, and getting 20 questions right will earn you 1,000,000 dollars, with Dick calling you "America's Newest Millionaire"[4]
What made the game show more memorable was that viewers can win 50,000 dollars by playing the home viewer game. The viewers' phone number have to matched the seven numbers in any way for the duration of the episode. In the first round, the last digit of each surviving contestant's number became the lucky number on the home viewer winning line. The last digit of the last correct answer given at the Wonderwall became the seventh & final number of the home viewer winning line.
Cancellation and Unaired Episode
On February 17th, the game show was officially cancelled for unknown reasons.[5] It's not known why the show was cancelled but it's believed that the show was cancelled for low viewership and only aired on saturday nights.[6] While only 10 episode aired, one was left unaired after its cancellation. According to an angelfire page, the unaired episode has a contestant named Efren Bojorquez winning the $40,000 on the Wall. While this isn't a lot of money compared to the big wins, Efren wasn't too happy.[3]
Availability
Only 8 episodes were uploaded onto YouTube by user, thewhammy83, two uploads being double episodes. As of 2024, the rest of the episodes and the unaired episode has yet to resurface.