#studio lambert

Liz Hurley is dead.

Well, for the purposes of this show, the very-much living Liz Hurley is playing The Deceased, a high-class businesswoman whose empire ran to all sorts of products. And whose empire needs to be wound up gracefully now that she's joined the ranks of the dearly departed.

Such a charismatic and attractive person will have appointed a flamboyant and interesting executor, right?

Robert Rinder, who missed his calling as a John Major-a-gram, rules the show with all the presentational skills and gravitas of Kate Thornton.

Which is a shame: the programme was the first time we've ever seen an iterated Prisoner's Dilemma, the people you shaft can come back and shaft you repeatedly. And there were questions about "fairness" and "justice" we've covered in the past.

And a cast where it was easy to cheer for the good guys and boo for the bad guys and gasp as people shifted in our estimations.

We're going to put The Inheritance down as a worthwhile, but failed, experiment. And that's fine, not all experiments succeed.

Plus! TV Times award nominations, when "A Midsummer's Night Dream" is not "A Midsummer Night's Dream", and why Merton Oxford put in a strong University Challenge performance even against strong competition.

Coming up this week:

Big Brother (ITV2, from tonight)

House of Games (3) with Richard Osman (BBC2, from tomorrow)

Portrait Artist of the Year (Artsworld, Wednesday)

The Inner Circle (BBC1, Saturday)

Over its six-episode run, the Netflix reality competition series Dance 100 will challenge eight choreographers to produce and present routines that utilize ever larger numbers of the Dance 100 crew – from seven, to 14, to 25, all the way to 100 dancers dancing up a storm of dance all in one big dance. The twist here? Those dancers are also the choreographers’ judges. As it kicks off, Dance 100 is…

The Circle: Quizzes

The Circle is fortunate to have a very engaged fanbase. To ensure we delivered a high volume of additional content, we produced a recurring series of quizzes with our blocked Players.

Each Player asked a variety of multiple-choice questions about their time in The Circle which was intercut with footage from the show.

This was part was one of the key digital franchises that allowed us to grow the Instagram Story Impressions by 299% compared to series 1.

The Circle: Games

A big part of the show is the games that help the players gain insight into one another to try and find the catfish… and to have some fun.

For the audience at home, we wanted to give them a chance to see how they would fare if they were playing the games. We worked closely with our games team to create additional questions and content, where possible.

We’ve been there, watched that, and saw the after-show.

Now I’m already thinking about series 2. And the international adaptations. I know full well this will be a slew of questions that I would know the answer too if I was more experienced, but I’m not, and I would very much like to hear what others with more knowledge think!

Netflix has bought the rights for regional adaptations of The Circle: now how does that work? Will it be grouped by continent or language? Will I be able to watch all three iterations of it if I wanted - rather, will they all be regional exclusive or can we just bite the bullet and have three versions under the same title all available? 

Then will there be format changes to each of the regions as has happened with Big Brother in the past? NA is more strategic, we’ve spoken about that before. Will there be varying degrees of social and competitive mechanics? 

Will there be the tie to the as-live (am I using that correctly?) production decisions and actions of S1? Letting audiences vote for certain things on the app, submit questions, for the show to react to the twitter criticisms in the early days of broadcast? How does that work on Netflix....? Does it transpose?

Again, let’s look, as we often find ourselves doing, at North American BB. You could upload previous seasons and not disturb much of how it was experienced originally - in-house votes, and jury decisions for a winner. At the very most, America’s Favourite Player goes to a public vote.

My partner Alex (@UndeniablyAlex on Twitter) has talked previously about the idea of Netflix One - a hypothetical service within Netflix where viewers can gather at particular times for certain shows ‘live broadcast’, which would allow real-time voting windows. It may not be in the immediate, but I see something like that possibly happening in SVOD future.

This brings us to an infographic of where me and Alex think The Circle could go. It is a show not without fault in its first series, and that’s okay. It’s for the best they were able to alter certain things during three weeks of broadcast, but some of it seemed funny... (the glaring incident being when events meant Kate would be most at risk to getting blocked, the blocking conveniently was different)

Now, important to this is that this infographic leaves out all the othering possibilities as to why this wouldn’t work off the bat for S2. Namely, Buffers.

As discussed in my previous The Circle post, the majority of UK contestants - never mind viewers - aren’t ready for a strategic approach yet. We have the exceptions of S1 and perhaps I’m not giving benefit of the doubt for if the rules did change and producers outlined that there must be an attempt to play strategically. But really, I think players would use buffers very very very close to the beginning. It’s in our instincts to err on the side of caution, and I imagine the fear of being first out of the show would be very real, and a LOT of people would use it on the early ratings. Meaning a lot of people would waste it.

Granted, Buffers would allow another dimension when the selected player returns. “You’ve shown your true colours!”, “Oh so now you don’t like me?” Etc, etc. It really depends what you want from the show. Maybe you want spat fights because sometimes they are massively entertaining. 

But a very important part of the show is how it is a microcosmic social network. 

For Example: If Alex blocks me on (real) social media, I cannot bounce that back at him and reject that. If anything, blocking is a sense of security in some instances. Yes, you can choose to block a user for many different reasons, but it is supposed to be a means of protection online. 

An alternative to using a buffer for immunity, and something we suspect the show will have fun with, is bringing back blocked players under new personas and profiles.

Likewise the final ratings was... flawed. We now know that the surprising (and winning) vote was Freddie giving Kate 2 stars instead of the 1 he gave to Dan and Sian. I am very interested as to what would have been prepared in the very unlikely, but still possible, circumstance of there being a four-way-tie.

Our proposed jury is a tried and tested mechanic and is not original, but every jury (and their reasons) would be different. Because it all comes down to the longterm relationships. S1 Final ratings was kind of tainted with that, given Freddie gave Kate those 2 stars probably due to his admiration and how their relationship matured. But jury is more explicit in ensuring that players vote with that “and what have we learnt” mindset.

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BBC Veteran Susan Hogg Joins Studio Lambert As Scripted Programming Chief, Head Of Drama