I've been watching Greed with some friends who are still kind of dipping their toe into getting into game shows and that's the one for sure. When it came out I was glued to the TV like I was with Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? when it was airing that season as well. In fact there were some weeks where I think I preferred Greed to WWTBAM. It's a real shame that it ended when it did (and frankly insulting that FOX's big game show idea a few years later was fucking The Chamber, maybe the most intelligence insulting Dick Clark produced (Dick I love you but you should have known better) television show) because I felt like it had a lot of mileage left.

That being said, I completely understand why it fell off like it did. The highlight run of the show happens like two episodes into the entire series (Daniel Avilia's legendary crash and burn is maybe the most defining game show moment of my childhood in that I STILL remember where I was in my living room watching it happen), and then it becomes a holding pattern of mostly $200,000/$500,000 question flameouts for months and months and months to the point where the show had to create the Million Dollar Moment wrinkle of bringing back old contestants to do one question just to give out money again. I think The Terminator idea is interesting in theory (sacrificing one of your partners for the chance to earn more money but also you're trading in someone else to help you answer the questions is fascinating and I don't know if I'd do it myself but I love that it's an option that adds a dangerous wrinkle to winning the big money) but needs some execution reworks. The Freebie felt almost useless in that most questions had one very obvious wrong answer that was almost always the one that was removed from the list. I liked how a lot of the question material was based off of studies as opposed to general knowledge but I can see why that would annoy some people. If the show had more time I'm sure they'd rework a lot of these kinks, but at the same time nothing says Kiss of Death for a television game show like having the rules change multiple times throughout the run, so maybe at the end of the day the show was really just snakebitten from the getgo. Wasted potential is a good way of describing it actually.