7 /10 1 Votes7
7.3/10 BuzzerBlog Original language(s) English No. of episodes 40 Director Hal Grant | 6.5/10 IMDb Directed by Hal Grant Country of origin United States No. of seasons 1 First episode date 9 June 2016 Genre Game show | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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Similar Game show, Idiotest, Hellevator, Baggage, Lie Detectors | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Winsanity is an American television game show broadcast by Game Show Network (GSN). The series, hosted by Donald Faison, premiered June 9, 2016.
Contents
Gameplay
The game begins with contestants being chosen directly from the audience. As part of attending a taping, every person is given a "Winwatch" (a glowing wristband) to participate as a would-be contestant. To start the show, Faison will hit the "Winsanity" button on the stage to lock in on a random contestant by turning their Winwatch green. Once that contestant is chosen, they will join Faison on the stage and will become a contestant. After a brief introduction about the contestant, the game begins.
The end goal of the game is to arrange ten numerical facts in order of largest to smallest based on the quantifier desired (e.g. the number of marriages each year in the US, or the number of President Barack Obama's Twitter followers). Each round builds upon the previously placed facts with the last round touted as the hardest of them all.
At the start of each round, Soltanovich will start the selector to choose additional audience members. The contestant will hit the Winsanity button on stage to randomly choose a select number of members of the studio audience. (In Round 4, there is only one contestant chosen in the audience.) Soltanovich will announce a prize that can be won by both the on-stage contestant and the randomly selected contestants in the studio. Faison will then announce how many members of the audience were selected. Soltanovich will announce the topic for the round. From here, Faison will announce what the items that need to be sorted are and play starts from here.
If a contestant is incorrect at any point with their placement, their game ends and a new contestant will try to complete the remaining spots on the corrected tree from where the last contestant left off. All prizes that were won are lost except for the guaranteed prize from the first round. The show concludes when all four rounds are played.
Production
The series was officially green-lighted on November 18, 2015, and premiered on June 9, 2016. On March 14, 2017, GSN announced that Winsanity would return for a second season, but with a new head-to-head format.
Reception
The premiere episodes performed relatively well by GSN standards, garnering 501,000 and 416,000 viewers for the two episodes airing on June 9.