If ‘Million Second Quiz’ Succeeds, NBC Gets the Grand Prize

NBC

The set for “The Million Second Quiz,” on a rooftop in the West 40s in Manhattan.

Pop quiz: what does broadcast television need right now?

Ryan Seacrest

Ask NBC, and the answer will be “The Million Second Quiz,” a groundbreaking competition that will start on Monday night and end 10 days later â€" the online component is 10 consecutive 24-hour days â€" with the presentation of what the network calls the biggest guaranteed pot of money in game show history. Whether that’s the right or wrong answer will be determined when the ratings start to come in.

At a time when shrinking network audiences are the norm, the “Quiz” is already winning attention for the scale of its ambitions, as symbolized by the three-story arena that has taken shape in the Clinton neighborhood of Manhattan, where the game will be played. In keeping with the million-second theme, it has the appearance of a gigantic hourglass; its sheer size almost says, “AMC and Netflix and YouTube can’t do this!”

After its debut on Monday, “Quiz” will be broadcast on NBC for an hour a night, every night, until Sept. 19, with one break for “Sunday Night Football.” In some ways, it is a throwback to a long-ago era when families would gather around the television set for big prime-time game shows. According to NBC, there hasn’t been a live game show scheduled in prime time since the 1960s.

Back then, though, viewers could only shout answers at the TV. Now, they can play along at home with an app. And when the game is not being played on TV, it will continue as a live, continuous stream on NBC.com.

Contestants, some of whom will be picked to compete on the basis of their Internet play, will take turns sitting in the “money chair,” where every second spent answering trivia questions is worth $10. Correct answers help them reach Winners Row, an area on the set where the five best players will live and sleep (and keep answering questions, lest they be kicked out of the top five) until the million seconds are up.

“This is the Olympics of quiz,” said Stephen Lambert, the British television producer who offered the idea to Paul Telegdy, NBC’s president of alternative and late-night programming. In the pitch, Mr. Lambert described the game “almost like a tennis match between two contestants.” After all, nothing attracts more viewers to broadcast television than big sporting events. That’s partly why the “Quiz” will try to look and feel like such an event, with its open-air setting.

Since the quiz show isn’t taped like, say, “Jeopardy,” some questions will be about the day’s news. “You might be asked, ‘President Obama signed what into law this morning?’ ” said the executive producer, David Hurwitz. Other questions will be asked by celebrities â€" inevitably, NBC celebrities. (“If there’s a question about the weather, who better to ask it than Al Roker?” Mr. Telegdy said.) On the final night, the final contestants on Winners Row will vie for a grand prize that could theoretically top out at $10 million, though it’s likely to be closer to $5 million.

Executives at NBC haven’t actually said this, but they clearly want the “Quiz” to be nothing short of a national event â€" the kind of big-ticket, must-see spectacle that turns up less and less often on the broadcast networks. To that end, the executives have hired Ryan Seacrest to host and have spent tens of millions of dollars to promote the game show this summer. They say that even some of their typical rivals might be caught rooting for it: Mr. Telegdy said a “competitive éminence grise from elsewhere in TV land” â€" he wouldn’t name the person â€" had sent him a well-wishing e-mail that said bluntly, “We all need this right now.”

The producers are aware that comparisons to the blockbuster ABC show “Who Wants to be a Millionaire” are probably inevitable (though there is no phone-a-friend option on this show). “Millionaire,” hosted by Regis Philbin, wowed the television industry when it drew 10, 20 and sometimes even 30 million viewers in 1999 and 2000. It continues to chug along in syndication, now with Cedric the Entertainer as the host. One difference is that “Millionaire” was already a proven hit in Britain when it arrived in the United States; “Million Second Quiz” will start stateside first. If successful, it will spread around the world.

In a telephone interview, Mr. Telegdy said that “the line will probably go dead, and a robot will eject me from my seat” if he uttered a specific ratings prediction. But his noncommittal answer was telling in and of itself: the goal, he said, is to “get people talking about NBC.”

Once upon a time, that network didn’t have to try hard to achieve that; now it does. So its parent company, Comcast, is having all of its various properties support “Quiz” through ads, guest appearances, reports on newscasts and the like â€" a strategy that it calls “symphony” and that was previously applied to the singing competition “The Voice.”

Mr. Seacrest, who is best known for hosting Fox’s “American Idol” and who also has a wide-ranging contract with NBC, said that after he heard the initial pitch from Mr. Lambert and Mr. Telegdy, the NBCUniversal chief executive, Steve Burke, called him to reiterate how important the “Quiz” was going to be. Mr. Burke also did so in an e-mail to every employee of the company on Wednesday.

“There is already a lot of great buzz, and we think there is a chance ‘The Million Second Quiz’ could really break through,” Mr. Burke wrote.

NBC is hopeful that starting “Quiz” slightly ahead of the fall television season â€" which doesn’t officially get under way until Sept. 23 â€" will benefit both the game show and the new series that the network will introduce later. The logic works like this: there is relatively little competition next week, giving “Quiz” a better shot at being sampled by the public; if the show catches on, then all of NBC’s ads for new series like “The Blacklist” and “The Michael J. Fox Show” will be seen by many more people, and giving away $5 million or $10 million will feel like money well spent.

A version of this article appears in print on September 7, 2013, on page C1 of the New York edition with the headline: If a Quiz Show Succeeds, NBC Gets the Grand Prize .