Saturday new shows: Kluizenjacht, Pop Cafe & De Deal.

Although RTL4 has been dominating the Saturday nights for quite some, other channels try to compete with new schedules or shows. NED1 has family entertainment, NED2 has a lot of drama series on prime-time, NED3 tries to get a respectable share with music-related shows while SBS6 will bring back ‘Sterren Springen’ in a couple of weeks and has already a new game show. But did it help to win back any viewers?

Similar to last week, RTL4 won the night with ‘Weet Ik Veel’, the second series of the celebrity/student quiz. ‘Wie Ben Ik’ is slipping up a little bit in comparison to the first series, with NED1 performing better thanks to hidden-camera show Bananasplit and ‘current affairs’ quiz show ‘De Kwis’. New drama series De Deal on NED2 got 469.000 viewers, which is a fair start.

Popcafe, a new AVRO show, hosted by The Mole host Art Rooijakkers opened with only 215.000 viewers and 3% market share. Not a very impressive start, and the show itself was a weird mix between a quiz show, a talk show and a radio show. Two teams, led by a radio DJ and a famous musician, compete in several rounds answering questions all related to music. When they want to answer a question, they need to ring the bell far above the table. In between there are clips, discussions, personal questions. You don’t really know what you are watching so what’s the need?

SBS6 will air movies at prime-time until ‘Sterren Springen’ returns at the end of March, but already programmed a new – Lottery sponsored – game show at the 22.00 time slot: Kluizenjacht, hosted by Marc Klein Essink. Ratingswise it couldn’t impress many people. The show opened with 349.000 (5,4%), in comparison – last weeks (repeat?) airing of ‘Komt een man bij de dokter’, a sketch show, did better with 394.000. At its own, without a lead-in of a big show, Kluizenjacht won’t do well in the coming weeks I assume.

The format itself was a typical Talpa show to be honest. The structure was okay, almost all games and elements were used in other shows: there was nothing new about it. One contestant is playing 6 rounds to eliminate vaults. In each round, he needs to chose a person out of 3 possible candidates, based on age, profession and education. So, he knows the topic of the question (for example female attraction – the question later was about female celebs in Playboy), chooses an opponent and they play the question. If he wins the round, he can eliminate a vault, if the ‘audience’ wins, the person gets 5,000 EURO.

When all six rounds are played, he has the possibility to open a vault with the chance of winning 500,000 EURO or spinning a wheel with a guaranteed win of 25.000 EURO up to 75,000 EURO. So, everyone who needs to choose between 2 or more vaults, will be taking the spin – if they really think about it. For me, the questions where all right, fun to play along, the set was okay – but whether you want the main contestant to win or the audience, I couldn’t be less bothered. The element of Miljoenenjacht (Deal or No Deal) is playing along all the time and the tense moment of opening the cases. That is something lacking in this. A few impressions of the show: