2 Months 2 Million Likely To Return, Plus My Thoughts On The Show

KRANTZ was on Episode 41 of the Deuce Plays podcast. If you want to know how the show was made you should listen to it, since it's the most detailed description I've heard. Some of the interesting points:

G4 has 90 days after the first run to decide if they want a second season. Ratings have exceeded expectations, so Jay is confident it will get renewed. 2 Months 2 Million is the most expensive show G4 ever produced. It's gotten strong word of mouth, so viewership has increased week after week. New G4 viewers also came to the network just to watch it. This is the first reality show for G4, a division of Comcast. The show has been heavily pirated, which surprised them, but they policed it pretty actively. They can't stream 2 Months 2 Million or offer it internationally until 90 days after the first run because of contractual arrangements (there have been a lot of complaints from people unable to watch it). Some viewers have suggested changing up the player lineup, but Jay doesn't like the idea: they've all been friends for years, and they might not even want to do it if the lineup was changed. Jay didn't want the show to be called 2 Months 2 Million because they didn't know if they could achieve that goal (though they had done so the previous two summers). Big no-limit hold 'em games didn't run too much over the summer, which hurt their earnings. Pot-limit Omaha ran more often, but they aren't big PLO players. They'll probably spend time learning PLO and mixed games before next summer's show. Additionally, the four of them are well known to their opponents now, so it's hard for them to get action. KRANTZ was new to UltimateBet, so he was able to get good action there. They didn't actually stumble upon Erica Schoenberg at a pool and set up a match, as the show suggested: it was a reality-TV setup. There was a process of coming up with episode ideas, like going dune buggying. There were arguments over what the players wanted to do, and producers' ideas that they didn't want to do. In the club scenes there would be signs up saying that filming was going on, and people would have to sign release forms. The stuff around pools generally wasn't set up, but sometimes the girls were miked up. The players weren't allowed to talk about the cameras, so they came up with stories like Emil being a prince from Dubai. Jay says the single guys pulled mad tail over the summer, but the producers chose to portray them as a lot dorkier than they are, e.g. showing Dani being shot down by his Connect Four date when in reality they dated for a while. Jay described a typical day while shooting the show and the process of making the show, e.g. the cameras weren't there continuously: they arrived late each morning. The four of them went to a lot of places where the cameras couldn't get in to film them, e.g. nightclubs. 2 Months 2 Million was more documentary style than other reality shows according to the staff that worked on it. They had one day off a week, though that could still be dominated by show work like G4 publicity. They were often drained by the end of the day.

They did talk about some non-show things as well. The guys would like to play live more often because of the weaker competition, but they would have to get used to the deeper stacks. Jay hasn't put a lot of work into his game in the last year since he's been working on his business DeucesCracked, the show, and writing a screenplay. Without working at poker constantly he can't remain at the top.

My thoughts on the show:

I love online poker so I anticipated it eagerly, and after the first episode I said it was the most exciting poker show I'd seen since the first episode of High Stakes Poker, maybe ever. My enthusiasm for it quickly waned, however, as it proved to be all short-attention-span theater, no meat. My favorite comment on it from the message boards was "ooh, shiny things!" I've seen brilliant reality shows before, and each of them was great because I got to know and root for a favorite character to win a competition. With 2 Months 2 Million, however, we don't get to know the characters at all, and the show isn't a competition format. Editing in slurping sounds over pictures of Emil drinking through straws seems to be the producers' idea of character development. As mentioned above, they even showed Dani being blown off by a girl he actually dated in order to keep up their preselected characterization of the four guys as nerds. The best character development I remember from the show was when they briefly delved into a guest star's debate about whether to go to college or be a poker pro. Despite all that, I enjoyed the show, am sad the season is over, and look forward to seeing it again. I've seen much better-made reality shows, however, and if it weren't about a subject I love I wouldn't have kept watching 2 Months 2 Million.

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