New Show: 007: Road to a Million

Did you know that Amazon owns MGM? I didn’t. Still, it also means that they own the James Bond franchise. Which brings me to 007: Road to a Million.

The USP, as I see it, in this show is putting pairs of everyday mops (members of the public) into a location from the movies and giving them Bond-esque challenges to achieve and general knowledge questions to answer.

Which is a tough ask for a production company to achieve. If we take the challenges, you can’t surely ask contestants to do anything that puts their lives at serious risk, and you don’t have all the special effects wizardry of the movies to use. So you are in danger of ending up with challenges which make the viewer think – what has this got to do with James Bond? Or even the Milk Tray man for that matter.

However, if you leave the Bond thing to one side until you get into the show, then there is certainly a level of challenge here. While it never quite matches the physicality of SAS: Who Dares Wins, or the gross out revulsion of some of the challenges on ‘I’m A Sleb Get Me Out of Here’, jumping from a helicopter, and estimating the weight of a tarantula (which involved picking it up) do make me glad to be sitting on the Clark sofa and not taking part.

I mean, if you do actually like taking on these kind of challenges, then I guess it’s an absolute blast, with visits to the Highlands of Scotland, Venice and Brazil amongst others thrown into the bargain.

But what about the questions, Dave? Well, like the first challenges, the first questions each pair get asked aren’t that challenging. Each question has three possible answers, and each is for serious, life changing amounts of money. But a scan among the credits reveals the name of Mr. David Bodycombe, and the questions get more and more difficult, and as a result, more and more interesting. I’m glad to say though that they did pretty much reward a certain amount of logical thinking. If one answer seemed more likely than the others it usually was because it was the correct answer.

I think that it helped me being able to binge watch several episodes one after another on Prime. Because I do think that certainly the first episode or two ask quite a lot of the viewer. There’s minimal explanation of the game play or what the game is really about. If you stick with the show you realise that it’s not a problem because it’s not that difficult to work out. IF you stick with it. Because I found the first episode to be a little disjointed in the way that it would suddenly jump from one contesting pair to another.

Another confusing thing is exactly what Brian Cox is doing. Now, I don’t blame Brian Cox for this. Dundee’s finest is a fantastic actor who always brings great value to anything in which he appears. But, I’m just not sure why he is in this. He plays a shadowy figure, who watches the contestants in a studio and whose voice asks the questions, when the contestants find them. Is he Blofeld? Is he M? It’s not clear, and keeping him apart from the contestants is maybe a bit of an own goal. Think what he would be like interacting with them like the various hosts of the different versions of The Traitors.

I’ve said before that shows that fall between two stools often just fall. As a viewer, it seems to me that you get more time devoted to the action adventure challenges than to the questions, yet it’s the questions that bring the contestants the wedge. But it has something. Hey, I like shows like SAS Who Dares Wins, Survivor and The Traitors so this always had a decent chance of appealing to me. But I’m really watching it as a show of this genre, and not as a quiz. I’d advise you to do the same.