Cheat (game show) on Netflix: A fresh take on a quiz show format

Cheat, which is spelled "Ch£at"using the symbol for British Pounds is something that I discovered and decided to watch because I have been noticing lately that my general knowledge skills have been diminishing as I stopped reading recently and have been consuming, like most people, a tremendous amount of Netflix and other such drivel where it is really unlikely you are ever going to learn anything.

As it turns out it is a pretty fun little show and the questions are a lot easier than they would be on a show like say, Jeopardy.

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The show functions like a lot of other quiz shows have in the past but instead of each player accumulating a certain amount of money on their own all of the players are working towards a communal pot that only one of them will be allowed to take home in the end. It starts out with 4 players and one person is eliminated per round until we eventually get to a winner.

At all times the players have access to the correct answer to be displayed on a small screen in front of them and if they choose to see the correct answer they need only hit a button which is placed in a hidden area that none of the opposing players can see. In fact, the players are not allowed to even look at the other players during question rounds but instead must look at the screen in front of them that displays the face of the person who is currently answering. The design behind this is for opposing players to be able to look for visible "tells" that a person is lying, a tactic commonly used in poker and probably police work.

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It's a fun show for a couple of reasons in my mind and one of them is that the questions are intentionally quite easy compared to other shows and there is a good chance that you, the watcher, are going to know quite a few of the answers yourselves and might be quite amused that the people on the show do NOT know the answers. I think that the contestants are likely selected because they aren't every smart rather than the other way around.

An extremely fine example of this would be an episode where a quite pretty girl named Nicolette cheats on nearly every one of her questions.

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She gets really easy questions just like everyone else but there is another person on the same show that gets the most softball questions that I have ever seen on a game show. His name is Ricky and his questions were along the lines of "which character is a fake reporter from Kazakhstan played by Sasha Baron Cohen" and "what is the first name of the Los Angeles Laker's player whose Twitter name is "King James."" He also had an obvious question about Minecraft and another one about types of whales which was so obvious that elementary school kids would have answered correctly.

Here's the thing in this show though. The smartest person is not necessarily going to win since you advance to the next round not by getting the most questions right, but by being able to detect who is lying the best. Nicolette, despite being quite stupid by most measures, managed to be able to detect which other people were lying the most, even though she actually cheated on every single one of her answers in the first round. Sorry for the spoilers but it had to said.

The name of this episode on the Netflix listing is "Lying Little Weasels" and if you watch no other episodes other than this one please watch this one because it is a very good example of how little what you know actually plays into who is actually going to win.

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Cheating opens you up to getting eliminated but it is absolutely essential to the advancement of the game because wrong answers take money away from the communal pot whereas cheated answers don't change anything. Correct answers obviously add to the pot. It's a little complicated but once you watch an episode you'll start to understand how it works pretty quickly.

Mostly I like the show because I learn a thing or two and the hosts of the show are quite funny as well.

Should I watch it?

Do you like game shows? Do you like general knowledge shows that aren't so difficult that you feel as though you could actually win it if you were on the screen? Well if you can answer yes to any of this than I think you will like Cheat. I know that I like it a great deal and have almost run out of episodes to watch.

Do yourself a favor though and keep the remote or gaming controller near your hand because they spend a lot of time explaining the rules to the audience in each episode. I would say about 10 minutes per episode are spent on exactly that and once you already understand the rules, there's no reason to have to listen to that again and again.

If you are looking for just a trial than please watch Lying Little Weasels first since it doesn't really matter what order you watch them in. The showdown between Nicolette and Ricky is just amazing.