Please Make All Weakest Link Episodes Like This Sunday’s Episode

It took over a year of frustration and complaints, and apparently lots of very angry people that we weren’t fans of it, but this past Sunday’s episode of Weakest Link (US) was the first one in the revival I ended up liking. It was enjoyable to the point of thinking, “If the show was always like this we’d have far different opinions of this show.”

This isn’t to say it is perfect. The decision to end the game after the sixth trivia round and go straight into a vote-off and the final for the money rather than having a seventh round is still game breaking. The show still leaves absolutely no reason to ever leave the best players. There’s still little reason to ever not “Bank” after every question in most rounds. However, enough other issues pertaining to the composition of the production were adjusted Sunday to make it easier to forgive certain things.

The contestants were portrayed far better in this episode. I don’t blame the contestants necessarily most of the time. Yeah there’s some less-than-stellar contestants but that’s par for the course with games of this nature. The show does not favor anyone with how it’s editing people, and the novel-length questions they tend to ask makes it an outrageously difficult task for contestants to keep track of everything.

This Sunday’s show felt and played better because the question writing was far better than most recent episodes. Weakest Link has a strange habit of filling their questions with non-sequiturs and jokes…and it’s asking contestants already under the stress of being voted off and on a timed quiz show and with hundreds of thousands of dollars on the line to weave through their word salad. Look at a few choice questions from previous weeks below.

Most of these are not necessarily difficult questions but if it takes viewers multiple attempts at reading the question to understand what is being asked then contestants have no chance. For the most part this Sunday’s show trusted the contestants, Jane Lynch (host), and the actual game to provide the entertainment and let the questions get to the point while still being challenging and interesting. This also lead to having one of the highest banks in US Weakest Link history.

What’s frustrating is that there’s a good group of people that make Weakest Link and I know they know that this is how the show functions best. I don’t know if it’s NBC or some other party demanding that Weakest Link become an insult comedy show with a few questions rather than a fun quiz show where insults from the host come naturally, but it does the show no favors. It’s a tough sell right now with quiz shows and game shows in general being so hot.

We’ve been looking for times to re-evaluate Weakest Link US because there were some unhappy people with our initial review, to put it lightly. We agree that percent grading make things seem far worse than they are and it’s why we’ve changed structures. Having said that we stand by our initial review of Weakest Link. We didn’t re-evaluate because season two, up until this Sunday, did not necessarily improve anything. However, if this is what they strived to produce, edit, write, and cast each episode to be like we may be more positive. I want to like Weakest Link so much and this Sunday’s episode was the first time the show stopped actively fighting against me.