Stream It Or Skip It: ‘The Floor’ On Fox, A Rob Lowe-Hosted Game Show Where 81 “Experts” Face Off For A Chance At $250,000

Look, we get that the networks were desperate during the dual strikes that paralyzed TV production during the summer and fall, and they likely accepted pitches for shows that may have not made the cut during any “normal” year. But we really have to wonder who at Fox approved of a new game show called The Floor, which is one of the most boring game shows we’ve seen in some time.

THE FLOOR: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: Scenes explaining the game play of The Floor are shown. Then host Rob Lowe comes out and introduces the contestants. Then 81 people come onstage and stand on a lit 9×9 grid on the floor.

The Gist: Each of the 81 contestants claim expertise in a particular topic, like “Veggies”, “Dogs”, “’80s TV”, “Nepo Babies” and more. To start the game a “Randomizer” picks one contestant, and that contestant has to decide which of his/her neighbors on the grid (everywhere but diagonally) to challenge. The topic will be the one in which the challenged contestant is the expert.

The two contestants come up to the podium and have a “duel,” where clues are shown — usually word clues or visual clues — and the two contestants take turns making guesses. Their 45-second clock runs when it’s their turn to guess and stops when they are correct and the other contestant’s clock starts. Incorrect guesses aren’t penalized but the time continues to run until the contestant guesses right or passes. Passing on a clue costs the contestant a 3-second penalty. Whichever contestant runs out of time first loses the duel.

The winning contestant takes over the losing contestant’s square, but if the winner was the one being challenged he/she also takes over the challenger’s topic, one that they may not be versed in. They get a choice: Stay up at the podium and challenge someone else or go back to the floor and let the Randomizer choose another contestant, who may end up challenging them.

At the end of the season, the last contestant standing wins $250,000. But along the way, the contestant with the most squares at the end of a particular episode wins $20,000.

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? The Floor is a bit of a hybrid of the early rounds of Who Wants To Be A Millionaire and Pyramid, with the volume of a show like 1 vs. 100.

Our Take: The Floor is created by John de Mol, who created both Big Brother and The Voice, and this show tries to take elements from both. The contestants try to act like they’re psyching each other out as they interact with each other on the grid and at the duel podium, and in side interviews the producers try to eke out pieces of competitive personality to make the show look like a reality show free-for-all.

But, in reality, The Floor‘s format is pretty straightforward and repetitive. There’s a set number of duels in an episode, which informs the duel winner’s strategy as far as whether he or she is going to keep challenging people or go back to the floor. The end-of-episode prize of $20k for the contestant with the most territory also adds to that strategy.

In essence, however, the show is just a series of quiz duels, with a lot of dead time in between. The clues given aren’t all that hard, as we saw from the get-go, when the first picked contestant challenged the woman who was an “expert” in tools. The tools shown on the screen during the duel weren’t things like turret lathes or drill presses; they were things like wrenches and hammers and sanders and nails. But they still stumped one of the contestants to the point where she was passing and taking so many 3-second penalties, her clock ran to zero pretty quickly.

But even when a duel is close, it’s not that exciting. And because we have so many contestants at the outset, we don’t really get a chance to know any of them beyond some basics. So it’s up to Lowe to carry all the show’s personality. He does a decent job, but he’s also not a high-energy host, as we saw during his run on Fox’s Mental Samurai. Without that high energy, the repetitive format drags even more, especially given the fact that the show has a 42-minute runtime (without commercials).

Sex and Skin: None.

Parting Shot: The contestant with the most squares gets $20,000, and we see scenes from episode 2.

Sleeper Star: We’ll give this to Natalia, simply because we liked her teal hair.

Most Pilot-y Line: The contestant who had no idea what nails looked like pretty much takes the cake there.

Our Call: SKIP IT. The Floor is a boring game show that depends fully on its host to have any kind of excitement or personality. And as much as we love Rob Lowe, he’s literally the wrong man for the job 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.