Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Snake Oil’ On Fox, Where Contestants And Celebrities Guess Which Business Pitches Are Real And Which Are Fake

On Snake Oil, contestants are paired with celebrity partners — in the first episode, it’s Michelle Williams (former Destiny’s Child member Michelle Williams, not the actor) and Rob Riggle (hobbling in on crutches and a boot for his broken ankle). As host David Spade describes it in the opening, they have to guess which of the pairs of products that are presented to them are real and which are fake, like the snake oil of old.

SNAKE OIL: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: On the set of Snake Oil, host David Spade says eight businesspeople are there to pitch their businesses. “The problem is, half of them are lying straight to our faces. And I’m used to that, ’cause all my friends are show-biz phonies.

The Gist: 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.

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? Take a bit of Shark Tank, and combine it with Netflix’s recent flop Bullsh*t: The Game Show and any version of To Tell The Truth, and you’ve got Snake Oil.

Our Take: 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.

Sex and Skin: None.

Parting Shot: The “Snake Pit” contestant decided to pick the fake product out of four on stage. If they guessed right, $50,000 would be added to what they already won.

Sleeper Star: Michelle Williams was a little unhinged while she was trying to help her contestant figure out which products were real… and we kinda liked it.

Most Pilot-y Line: There was one product that looked completely and obviously fake, and we’re not sure if that was done on purpose just as a luck-of-the-draw thing or not. Likely it was just something that wasn’t thought through enough.

Our Call: STREAM IT. If Snake Oil can fix its pacing problems, and if Spade could actually up his enthusiasm half a notch, there’s the potential for a fun show here.

Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.