Supersized ‘Millionaire’ cashes in on sweeps

In honor of the television arts festival known as February sweeps, “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire,” the world’s most rhetorically named quiz show, offers for one week a “Super Millionaire” edition -- the term “multimillionaire” presumably was not sexy, or super, enough -- with a top prize of $10 million and two new “lifelines” to help whoever wants to be a super-millionaire become one. This fun began Sunday night and will continue tonight, Thursday and Friday at the strangely late hour of 10 p.m.

Back in prime time after almost two years -- a daily version of the plain old “Millionaire” is doing well in syndication (it runs locally on KCAL) -- the show would perhaps be more accurately titled “Who Wants to Be a Super Millionaire but Probably Won’t Be.” Like most of the world’s cash contests, it is a game of chance that only looks like a game of skill; so scattershot are its multiple-choice questions, so often do they depend on guessing, that winning or losing is essentially a matter of luck of the draw. Guessing is, of course, a kind of democratic substitute for actual expertise, as mastery of trivia is a popular substitute for deep knowledge -- and what could be fairer in a country where even the least curious boy or girl may grow up to be president?

It’s fundamentally the same show as before. You still have to say it’s your final answer when it’s your final answer. As if in apology for the increasing obscurity of later questions (during what network show was a condom first advertised? “Herman’s Head”), the early ones are almost ridiculously easy: The national anthem of United Kingdom is “God Save” what? (The flag? The queen? The isles? Elton John?) Which is to say that most anyone who makes the cut -- who wins the “Fastest Finger” round to sit in the hot seat -- and is a little bit careful can walk away with money.

The perennially hale and well-dressed Regis Philbin is back in the emcee’s chair. Philbin, who looks barely half his 103 years and speaks like the last remaining inhabitant of Walter Winchell’s Broadway, is the perfect host for a show like this, in that his flair for melodrama is somehow unaffected by his air of not taking any of it seriously. And unlike “Jeopardy!’s” slightly smug Alex Trebek, he does not give the impression that he actually knows the answers himself. He’s just happy to be giving money away. Philbin is like a strange uncle you cherish for his eccentricities. “I love that name Kim,” he said to first contestant Todd Kim, a Justice Department lawyer. “Do you mind if I call you ‘The Kimmer’?” When his voice broke, Philbin said, “I’m getting excited and my voice is leaping out of my throat here -- it’s only because I’m not feeling so well.”

What passes for change here, besides a new set and the amount of cash potentially dispersed, is the addition of two new “lifelines,” the helpful hints whose use are as much strategy as the game allows. In addition to the old Fifty-Fifty, Ask the Audience and Phone-a-Friend, players may now also use the Double-Dip, which allows them two stabs at an answer, or poll the Three Wise Men -- or people, since one of the men was a woman. The experts on Sunday’s game, who until called remained “shrouded in mystery,” turned out to be a million-dollar winner from the syndicated “Millionaire,” an astrophysicist and a rock critic; they seemed as randomly selected as the questions.

According to ABC, “The stakes and tension will be at levels never seen before on network television” (this statement presumably does not include coverage of non-manufactured events, like presidential elections or wars), but there is something about other people’s good fortune, especially when expressed merely as numbers, that remains abstract. The Kimmer left with half a million dollars, which is not, as they say, hay, or chicken feed, but neither was it particularly compelling TV.

For the next sweeps, meanwhile, I’d like to propose “Who Doesn’t Want to Be a Millionaire,” in which rich people could compete to rid themselves of their worldly goods. Now that would be something worth staying up for.

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‘Who Wants to Be a Super Millionaire’

Where: ABC

When: 10 to 11 tonight, Thursday and Friday

Host: Regis Philbin

Executive producers Michael Davies and Paul Smith