Winston Gerschtanowitz has come under considerable fire for his hugely underrated game show The Best Answer. “It’s really just a little infantile. I don’t care!”
SBS 6 is doing well. After removing the poorly viewed game shows Think Inside The Box with Richard Groenendijk and Vier Is Te Veel with Sander Lantinga, the channel now commits another blunder with the new Winston Gerschtanowitz game show The Best Answer. That format is also wafer-thin and nobody looks at that either.
Winston massacred
The Best Answer revolves around the assessment skills of candidates, for example: how many pink cars are registered in the Netherlands? The candidates can then write down what they think and the one furthest away from it is eliminated. Sound infantile? Is it too.
Jordi Versteegden, media journalist for De Telegraaf, slaughters the program in the culture and media podcast of the newspaper. “It’s actually something you normally play as part of a whole program, of estimating how much the answer will be. That is a nice part in Ik Hou Van Holland, for example, but not for an entire hour.”
‘It’s infantile’
Colleague Daphne van Rossum agrees. “The questions are also a bit infantile, like: how many pink cars are on the road? Those kinds of questions. You have to estimate that. Some people say a million pink cars, others say a hundred pink cars. I don’t really care at all. Yes, right?”
Jordi: “Exactly, and I think a lot of viewers have that, because no dog is watching. There are also people who think it’s Winston Gerschtanowitz’s fault, but I don’t think you can blame him completely. He is simply part of the Postcode Lottery. You can think of it as a disguised commercial and this falls under his contract.”
cheap decor
Jordi thinks it’s really bad television. “It also looks like they only put 25,000 euros into the decor, because that also looks very cheap. That red area behind Winston… A nice light could have been put on that. All in all, it just feels a bit like: we cram it into the Sunday evening of SBS 6.”
Daphne: “But then you don’t really start well, do you? I mean: Four Is Too Much is off the tube, Think Inside The Box is off the tube. What about the policy of SBS 6?”
From the tube?
Is Winston going off the tube now too? Jordi: “Yes, I called SBS 6 to ask if this program will also disappear. That would make sense, because it has less viewers than Four Is Too Much, but they say, ‘No, the weather is nice outside, so maybe that’s why people haven’t found the program yet.’”
Daphne: “Yes, the fair weather card, nice and easy.”
Jordi: “Yes, nice and easy, so I also continued to ask: ‘John, but why have those other programs been taken off the TV?’ They say they don’t really have an unambiguous policy for that, except that they already had another program on the shelf for the place of Vier Is Te Veel. Now there is nothing to trade in. The shelf is empty.”