Snake Oil Review 2023 Tv Show Series Cast Crew Online
For the “Initial Investment,” each contestant gets a bank of $50,000. They choose one of the pairs of businesses — charm bracelets made from baby’s hair and teeth, whiskey infused with venison, a plastic tie protector, a dating app for people to find their polar opposites, etc. — hear the tagline from the businessperson, and then watch an infomercial made by the show’s producers. They then have 60 seconds to ask the businessperson questions.
They pick which business to invest in then lock in an investment amount. The opponent gets a chance to “poach” the business that wasn’t chosen. If the contestant invested in a real product, the money they chose is added to their bank; if they chose snake oil, the money is taken out. If the contestant is wrong and the opponent decided to poach, the opponent gets the investment money.
In “The Big Investment”, things go mostly the same way, but the contestants only get to ask questions of one businessman, and there’s no poaching. There is also a bigger minimum investment and their limit is all the way up to what they have in the bank. The winner of this round goes to “The Snake Pit.”
In “The Snake Pit,” the contestant is presented with at least two products; they have to guess the fake one. The more products they choose to look at, from 2 to 5, increases the money they can add to their bank and go home with, up to $100,000. If they guess wrong, their bank is cut in half, but they still go home with that money.
Snake Oil has the same problem a lot of new game shows have: There’s not enough game play action for the hour timeslot it occupies. The pacing is slow, with a lot of filler, like watching the “REAL/SNAKE OIL” graphic spinning around as a way to build tension. The game could easily fit into a half-hour slot and completely work.
It would work in a shorter timeslot because we found the game drawing us in, trying to guess which of the pitches were real and which were fake. The producers (one of which is Will Arnett) did a good job with most of the pairs of making the fake products seem plausible and the real products (and their creators) seem slightly ridiculous. That means there were enough surprises to keep us intrigued.
The “infomercials” were chuckleworthy enough, especially one about “face soaps,” which were 3D-printed soaps made from photos of people’s faces.
We would have liked to hear more about the businesspeople who present the products, which we didn’t get a lot of in the first episode. And there was a bit of inconsistent editing, where we see Spade asking one of the fake businesspeople about what they really do, but not the rest. Spade himself felt like he was in it for the paycheck at times; yes, we know he’s been doing his DGAF thing for 30 years, but there were points during this first episode where he seemed like he was half-asleep. He came alive the most when he goofed around with Riggle about his broken ankle.
