For me, the jury is out on the new series of Deal but having said that, there’s been some good moments and drama which is what helped make the show a success the first time around.

But there’s some things I’ve noticed that need to be addressed in my opinion. Firstly, are players not allowed to swap boxes anymore?

What’s with the offers too? Especially the AMO ones. Feels very 2005 like with low offers at the start and insanely generous ones at the end!

The offers are very random too and usually have to be x thousand, y hundred rather than ‘straight’ figures.

I don’t mind the three-box offer simply because it became a de-facto gameplay feature in later years especially with the big money involved. So we’re kind of used to it.

I wonder if there’ll be a second series?

I agree with everything you've written there, and I believe there is going to be a second series (or a first series? Or a third series?!)...

I have to say being an old-school Dond-er the three-box offer still doesn't sit quite right with me, but it would've been so useful in so many games in the original run and saved an awful lot of people a huge loss (I keep coming back to the bloke, but 1p Trevor - his last box was the QM, he's looking at at least £30,000 at 3-box with 1p, £250 and £250,000 remaining. He deals, takes out the £250k, legendary player, perfect result).
I'm glad there's no offer prediction, that's one gimmick I genuinely detest. Mainly because I'm just terrible at predicting stuff.

I love the offers sometimes, they do seem to hark back to the very early days, £22,900 or £17,300 or £6,700 or whatever, my brain would prefer figures rounded to the nearest hundred but hey, that's just the way my brain works!
It's interesting to note that the AMOs aren't in live play, and live offers seem not to come close to the mean at all, which is a departure from the original DoND's early patterns of course. Whether we'll see an AMO in live play...someone's got to go all the way for that to happen, you feel, and as we saw in the first batch of shows, at the moment we tend to be socially liberal but fiscally ultra-conservative, so I think it'll take somebody who is already comfortably-off to take the game to 2-box! And if the candidates being selected are only those who could really do with a bit of extra cash, perhaps that scenario will be far less common than in the original show...

To be fair we are seeing several inflated offers in live play (such as Michelle's 30k on 2 blues/100k and Simon's 15k on blue/4k/50k), the only reason we're not seeing the AMO 2 box offers in live play is the offers are so generous even before then that no rational player would reach that point in live play with the big money in play.

As for the 3 box offer, I'm personally on board with it, it makes it more tempting to go on at 5 box, and going all the way from 5 box to 2 box without an offer on the original version always felt like a flaw with the format. I certainly prefer them having a 3 box offer in every game to the Banker offering one box at a time on occasion as a gimmick like in the later years of the Channel 4 run!

This is a lot longer that I intended to be! I agree with your points danielbaker1992. There will almost certainly be a second series as the show pulled in around two million viewers on average.

There are several things that I like about the new version:

The board is not a clone of the original version. We've had 3,000 games with the original board and there isn't much to offer from it. Don't get me wrong, I have a fond spot for it, but it's just like having vanilla ice cream all the time.

The three-box offer is a novelty that works with the new board structure. Because there are only four large amounts, the board will usually become unexciting with two boxes left (two-thirds with £10k or less, in fact).

No gimmicks. Box 23 is gone. Guessing what the offers will be; or awkward 'deal' buttons which reveal information that should be private; a thing of the past. (Some twists weren't bad per se. E.g. the confusingly-named "Banker's Gamble"; or some 'theme weeks'.)

Stephen is a good presenter and knows what he's doing. He has the tendency of taking up too much of the limelight compared with the other players. There's a genuine connection developing between him and the new Banker, which is essential.

(The original Deal was never the same after Glenn Hugill left, about the same time that Box 23 arrived. The connection between his replacement and Noel wasn't the same, with a noticeable character change. If you are reading, Glenn, thank you so much for giving us so many years of memories and enjoyment.)

The presentation and set are fine. It's a bit of a weird mishmash at the moment with the titles doing one thing and the set and board using hexagons as a motif, but it works.

The things that I dislike:

The first two offers are so low as to be insulting. Because there are seven offers instead of six, the Banker can be lazy at the start and not be punished. The game is basically irrelevant until half of the boxes have been opened.

(This was the case in the original, with no-one dealing the first offer and only one person dealing the second. They had a purpose in being somewhat tempting, even with the applied pressure of continuing by Noel and others.)

Then there is the linear offer structure. In general, most offers are simply better each time relative to the mean, regardless of what happens. This is not as much Player versus Banker as Player versus Spreadsheet. Does it matter what the amount is offered to the nearest £10?

The above-mean-offers are dire. For a pilot of 20 shows (plus 2 celebrity shows), a lot of games had the Banker make no attempt to eke out any saving at 2-box, even when the offers were theoretical. He was quite content at effectively giving some players arbitrary freebies, removing any semblance of game theory - or even game - from the show.

(This could only make sense if the show absolutely had to keep under budget as it was 'scared money'.)

Does the show actually work with £100,000 as the top prize? What would people deal at with two boxes in 2024 that is below the mean? Pilots are meant to resolve these questions, yet we don't know. (Add to that the near-mean offers towards the end which are also excessively generous.)

The game isn't so much as what the Player wins as what the Banker saves. The Banker is the real player of the show, and must work out how best to play their opponent.

Needless to say the average amount on the board is too low. I don't understand the thought process behind it, other than the fact that the show has likely outperformed expectations at ITV. The downturn in advertising has contributed, but this change is harsh.

Perhaps there were green eyes in ITV, thinking that Deal would challenge existing shows and so had to have its wings clipped? Or some weird kind of progressivism where players have to be protected from losing large amounts of money by... not giving them much of a chance to win large amounts?

A win of £10,000 is still very good, but that's on offer on many ITV game shows already. It all feels like an unforced error and will mean that the show is cut short early by one or two years.

The reds could be doubled in value, either for the charity editions or for normal games as well. It could extend the life of the show considerably for the relatively small cost increase in production.

My main concern:

The greatest danger to the show is apathy. With a more restricted subset of the population interested in applying due to the lower amounts on offer, we won't have the same diversity of players on the show and the stories and personalities will become too similar.

It's important for the show's makers to know that not every player should have a happy ending, as tough as that sounds. (Give them all the support that they need afterwards, by all means.)

People watch not because the struggle is easy, but because they can watch what would happen without being negatively affected by the consequences of the actions unfolding. A game of second-guessing and opportunity and calculation of the risks involved. For that brief moment, for one hour, rich and poor viewers alike, we are connected.

At the moment I think the show has one or two series in it, so around 300 shows. It could make double that with changes.

Last thoughts:

The show still works. I fear that without changes, it will resort to gimmicks and encourage players to gamble more and more, until it gets cancelled for something else altogether.

That said, I'm still going to watch and see if it works out. There's no show quite like it on the telly where things are as unpredictable and produce so many emotions and memories. Good luck to the team behind it and all possible success.

Coming into this revival, my biggest feeling was that the show almost had to decide what it meant to exist in 2023, without a host who defined the format in this country for better and worse, how much of that energy to keep and how much of it to jettison as baggage.

Honestly, I don't think they know either - and sometimes that's fascinating itself. There's 2005-like offers and pregame explanations like it's a brand new show, but then there's references to the Channel 4 era casually dropped into proceedings - even such lore as the "1p club" - and that just makes the lower prize money seem like even more of a false economy. I can't help but wonder if ITV might have been better off going for the OG board and a less-known host - quite possibly a cost-neutral move overall relative to the £100k/Mulhern setup they actually did - but the way the ratings have gone for this first run is validation in itself, and I think it may well have helped that the gameplay was so erratic, making the viewer uncertain what the player would do even though the offer structure created a "play for the endgame generosity" meta that was super obvious for the likes of us.

Which leads me onto the second element of "what does it mean for DoND to exist in the mid-2020s?" - how the actual gameplay would work. When I first saw the £100k board, my immediate reaction was "oh that might actually be sneakily good because on the £250k board, in 2023, with a responsible host, there'd be so many early Deals?" I didn't know then, of course, that the offers would go full 2005, and I still wonder what the gameplay would have looked like if either that or the board were different. Maybe we'll find out in 2024! But ultimately, it felt like for half of that initial run people just did whatever would have worked in the game before theirs, to a greater extent even than I recall in the C4 era - and it was absolutely a dynamic then, at least after box wins of either extreme. The variance in offer generosity between contestants felt vindictive at times to me then (although me then was a uni-age autistic economics geek whose actual arrival at uni was delayed in part by family and others persuading me I wasn't ready to live independently at 18 or even 19, so I was viewing the show from a quite distinct angle); its absence in 2023 felt awkward in another way, not helped by the utter clunkiness of the four-figure 3sf offers. I'd have loved to have been a consultant on this revival on the offer-creation side of things!

DoND in a recessionary environment isn't new - and part of the intrigue of 2008-on episodes was the show working through that in real time, Noel flipping between empathy and manipulation, seemingly torn between a thousand impulses with conflicting implications for his ultimate driving force of "stop at nothing to make exciting television" - but DoND in a post-Brexit environment is, and honestly the single biggest thing I'm most impressed with ITV DoND pulling off is seemingly recreating the wing cameraderie of old in a period of increasingly intense cultural division. Whatever else the people behind this show got wrong or right, the casting team deserve a ton of credit IMO.

I feel like the ultimate lesson of this revival's success is that DoND, played straight, is still a winning format for today's daytime audiences. I hope that's a lesson that ITV et al. do not choose to forget.

I'll make it a hat-trick of veterans, even though I'd already commented in this thread so it's not quite the novelty it may otherwise have been - simply to add to the record my agreement with the sage words of the two who wrote before me.

This new-look Deal is growing on me. It feels almost back to basics.

I’m still a bit indifferent about low opening offers though, but equally no one takes them anyway and never did in the Noel years bar one player.

The tension element is there. And we’ve got players who are serious OHOs as well and for me, that’s made the games very watchable.

I’d like to see the swap back though, but I like the 3-box offer. I also think it benefits hugely from being free of gimmicks and silly twists which used to render the main game null and void.

I’m also not a fan of these AMO’s. But you wouldn’t complain if you were playing the game!

It does make you realise how intrinsic Noel was to the show's success though. It's a drum I keep beating, but it's a pretty valid point. Your best references are from people who casually watched the show back in the day and asking them what they thought of it. Most have said ''it felt like a psychotic death cult, Noel was the leader, he made you believe in the occult and you were hooked''. We're getting on for 20 years now since that heyday so if that curious atmosphere remains impressed in people's minds, it's pretty telling.

Otherwise I quite like the stripped back gameplay elements. Maybe not quite to the robotic degree where the notion of swapping the box/talking to the Banker aren't even uttered, but it's nice to know that everyone gets the same show and if you are unlucky enough to win a blue, you're not getting bailed out.

I do wish some contextual influence was applied to the proveout rounds though. I watch these shows with a casual observer (suppose I more or less am now) and even they get profoundly irritated at ''we'll have my oft-referred to lucky lucky, deliberately withheld box 22 next please'' with Stephen looking on impassively like a seagull. It negates the Banker's would-be offers yet we hear ''this is what you would have been offered at this stage'' - no though? You must surely know this, Ste.

All you lot do is either chat sh*t or say the exact same sh*t every day.

Not much in between.

Ehh, a few thoughts now the show has reached another random break (good)

Mulhern is now markedly better at realising what the proevout is supposed to be. Makes a point of remembering and pointing out what boxes had been earmarked for saving.

They are still very much script reading with blue/red values though. Blue = always good, red = always bad. Probably won't improve at this point and today's game (Guy) was one of the worst examples for it, raising the roof at £750 when it was the 2nd highest value and way way closer to the £2k than it was to the other blues.

Ellie (this week) was one of the worst contestants we have ever had. Made 2006's Janelle look like Mary Poppins. Probably genuinely what it would have looked like had that 2007 (?) contestant not been booted off and had played an early game instead.

The swap should be offered. More players are withholding boxes than ever and it's a weird omission, particularly the lack of reference to it. Not in Mully's script, you see.

ONE game per week should see a random value removed from one of the boxes and replaced with an angry honey badger that leaps out and savages everyone.

OK, so, now that the show has finished again for now, a lot of you are probably wondering what I made of Series 2 of the revival.

It's still simply just OK to be honest. Perfectly watchable, but it'll never be as good as the original. Plus, a lot of the shows have been rather samey, which is one reason why I haven't really commented on it much beyond what I'd do every week.

The two biggest problems for me are: the lack of a swap, especially in games like the one from last year (forget his name) which absolutely warranted one, and the fact the offers are so systematic, for want of a better word. Though, to be fair, the last week showed signs that this may be changing.

Also, if the jackpot goes too early, it results in a rather low stakes game that you might as well give up on until 5-box at the earliest.

But, yeah, it's fine enough viewing still. I await it's return.

Aye, it's utter pish, mate.

Welcome back!

Steady on, old bean!

No, it's good to see you back again, make no mistake. Hope you're keeping well! I must say I agree with your general sentiment; it's quite pleasant viewing, usually nothing exceptional, but certainly not drab either.

Taking a tangent from replying to give my own views now (which I'm well aware that nobody asked for, but I don't care anyway ), I genuinely feel that we've had a few episodes which have surpassed the levels of excitement and tension I remembered from early-to-mid 2006. At least, they have done for me! I love the way we are introduced to, and actually get to 'know', the contestants this time around, which was completely absent from the old show (during the first few years anyway; I can't speak for the last 6 or 7 years as I wasn't watching). We root for the players in a way that we didn't, really, in the past. The sense of connection is far greater.
I feel that people's negative or traumatic past/current experiences are managed particularly well - a player might have an illness with a terrible prognosis, or maybe they had some traumatic childhood events, but these are mentioned, dealt with, put in their place and used as motivation as the show goes on; contrast this to the old show milking every tear from every eye in every way physically possible (albeit not in the early years) and what you see now is an altogether healthy way of acknowledging the bad event, without making it the sole focus of everybody's attention.

Having read and heard about how the old show was during its final few years, and watched a few episodes recently, I think it wouldn't be any exaggeration to say that the current show's baseline level of entertainment (if you will) is far higher. I know that is to compare the 'declining' phase of one show with the advent of another, but I think the comparison has some merit. As a general rule, I feel the contestants in this show are more interesting and relatable, the gameplay more involving of the viewer as a result (even if not quite as exhilarating as in the distant past), the courageous defeats more provoking of empathy, the stupid gambles somehow more infuriating, and the sky-high wins so much more enthralling and, ultimately, fulfilling.

It's a different show, and it is in this fact that I venture to say the understanding of its appeal lies: in the past, you watched people play Deal or No Deal. This time, you are watching people play Deal or No Deal.
The peak of this show may not be anywhere near that of its predecessor, but that would be an extraordinary thing anyway, just as that stratospheric period was at the time.
Besides, Dr Hindsight always has a way of engendering deep, heartfelt nostalgia for a golden era - irrespective of the inevitably more beige, and decidedly ordinary, reality over which it drapes that cloth of gold...

May as well throw in my two cents as well!

Short answer is I've grown to like this new version of Deal Or No Deal, enough that I'm happy to watch every episode in the evening after work. But there are still a lot of areas I reckon the show could improve upon.

THE GOOD

* I absolutely love the rapport between contestants, and how the show gives you a proper insight into who they are as people, not just where they're from and what they do for work but also what motivates them, what they want out of the show etc.
* Mulhern is great as a neutral host, always being encouraging and supportive and never criticising contestants for their decisions
* Linked to both of the above, Mulhern does a great job of always making newbies feel welcome, and giving each contestant on the wings some air time in the pre-selection into
* Gameplay-wise, making round 5 2 boxes instead of 3 is an absolute masterstroke. It reduces the probability of disaster significantly and encourages people to go on in a way that isn't too pushy.
* The 'back to basics' approach with its lack of gimmicks is refreshing

THE BAD
* Offers being more generous as the game goes on is fine. But the early offers are so poor it's rarely ever the right decision to deal before 5 box. And the 2 box offers so often being over the mean, sometimes absurdly so, defies all mathematical sense. Heck, the banker seems to be more generous on more dangerous, volatile boards compared to more stable ones, which is the opposite of how it should be...
* The red side of the board is still too lopsided. The 100k top prize is fine, reduced ad revenue and all that, but the fact that SEVEN reds are valued between 1k and 10k is too much. After several reds which only go up in increments of 1k and then eventually 2.5k, you suddenly have a HUGE jump from 10k to 25k, followed by another huge jump from 25k to 50k. It's too extreme. It also means if a contestant is unlucky enough to take out the top 4 early, nearly all the tension and excitement disappears.
* The constant 'what do you feel from the box' is annoying. I know it happened on the old show too, but it's up to eleven here...

THE UGLY
* Why oh why oh why is the swap never offered? It's jarring as hell, especially on a finish where it isn't two blues and/or the remaining box is one the contestant has said means a lot to them. The swap has always been available on the old show, and in nearly every international version. Let the contestants have the chance to swap, damn it!

I've honestly found the 2023 revival of the show a bit hard to get into with the reduced top prize, but i suppose that this would've motivated the Edmonds era contestants with lowered expectations to play deeper into the game, similar to how box 23 helped plug the 2013 extreme caution era by encouraging players to carry on, knowing that if they played on and it went horribly wrong, they had a guaranteed chance to recoup their losses at the end.

Players becoming overly cautious was one of the main things that caused the original show to get stale with the show becoming absolutely riddled with emotionally and/or financially unstable who were, for the most part, either dealing at 8-box or 5-box (sometimes 11-box) because either they needed money desperately and required a win of £5,000 - £26,000 to bail them out of their money problems, or they were just too emotionally unstable to take any risks, knowing they'd be inconsolable with regret and thinking that everyone would think badly of them if they decided to play on and it went wrong. I'll admit I haven't been following the Mulhern era closely enough to see if this is a common theme in the new series, but from what I can see, this no longer seems to be the case - it made for uncomfortable viewing on the old version seeing nearly every contestant in floods of tears over their kids or over some debt that needed to be paid, and just doing safe deals all the time (which also made for tedious viewing, especially during prolonged periods of highly cautious contestants like late-2013 for example.....)

I think a much better board structure but keep the 100k top prize would be to have the Edmonds-era board with the 250k replaced with one of the new values, maybe the 7.5k. This new board has far too many "orange" values and you're meant to get excited with a win of 3-5k or so which would have been just consolation 10 years ago!

100% agreed. The 100k top prize isn't the problem- 10k being the 5th highest red is!

IMO a good set of reds would be something like this:

2k, 3k, 5k, 7.5k, 10k, 15k, 25k, 35k, 50k, 75k, 100k

And make 1k the highest blue - replace £50 which is a thoroughly non-descript blue amount. 1k has always been considered an 'honorary blue' because of how close in utility value it is to £750, may as well fo the whole hog abd make it an actual blue!

But what you said (2005-era board with 250k replaced by 7.5k) would be good too and a huge improvement over the current board.

And funny about 3-5k once being consolation only but now being considered a decent win, because when you factor in inflation, a 3-5k win in 2006 is equivalent to 5-8.5k in real terms now! Whereas 3k nowadays isn't even 1.8k back then...

It is *very* weird. I can't remember who (shows, both player and gameplay wise, aren't imprinting in my head anyyywhere neeaar like the 2006+ era did) but it was in S2 around November time and he had made a certain box his *thing*. More than usual. I think it had been included in a drawing by their kid? Lucky numbers are being kept with higher frequency, but it's still not that common for a box to be the centerpiece of the game itself.

There was no greater circumstance for the swap to be outright offered in the *first* round, let alone at the end... let alone have reference made to it.

And yet? Cue the loud shirt git Brian: ''Well it don't matter if the £100k is in there cos you isn't winning it anyways!''

So... offer him the swap?

It genuinely has that vibe where a colleague is ''let go'' for dubious/undisclosed reasons and people are awkwardly evasive about them. That isn't an exaggeration, it really does remind me of those instances.

Late to this thread but it’s good to see some old faces on here with their respective opinions of this.

Funnily enough I wasn’t even watching the programme until I had a trip to A&E and it was on the waiting room TV.

As a new viewer of the programme it would be absolutely fine but I think anyone who enjoyed the original version would make comparisons which put elements of the show negatively and inferior of the original. The box values are odd and the banker strategy is definitely different. The offer windows are confusing too. I think the lack of £250,000 affects the overall weight of the offers, the extra money on the board gave us a complacency with the offers especially early game, whereas now everything feels naturally low. Tie that with inflation we have a significantly higher worth on the original game than we do now. £5,000 would have been a decent house deposit in 2007, now youd need at least 10/15k for a worthwhile deposit, at least in my area.

The game I watched was a 50k box win so a little bit of the 2006 magic came rushing back for a brief moment!