Behind the scenes of ''Deal or No Deal''

Wear a short skirt. Carry this briefcase. Walk down those stairs. Those were the only instructions Tameka Jacobs received when she auditioned to be one of the 26 models for NBC’s Deal or No Deal last year. The producers chose her, wowed by her ability to pull off the hat trick, but she remained clueless about what she’d been hired for until the first day of rehearsal. Then a producer conveyed everything the leggy case-bearers needed to know in one simple phrase: ”’Big numbers bad, little numbers good,”’ Jacobs recalls. ”That’s the slogan.” At first, it’s difficult to explain TV’s most addictive game show to the uninitiated without making it sound convoluted: There are 26 cases, and each has a dollar value of between a penny and a million bucks, see, and you pick one, but you don’t open it. Then you open other cases, and some shady Banker guy sitting in a darkened booth above you offers you money not to open any more, and Howie Mandel hits people’s fists and…hey, wake up! But plop someone down in front of a TV, and they’ll quickly get it, and they’ll just as quickly be riveted by the show’s unbearable tension. Millions are now hooked on the ”Hey…big numbers bad, little numbers good!” mantra: When NBC (which redeveloped the show after ABC tried and gave up) debuted Deal in a weeklong run during the December dead zone last year, it averaged a strong 12.7 million viewers. The show returned in February, continued its winning streak, and finished the 2005-06 season in 13th place. Now Deal — which will air on Mondays at 8 p.m. and Thursdays at 9 this season — returns in a four-day blitz starting Sept. 18, and for the week, the top prize will climb from $1 million to $6 million. Asked to account for the show’s popularity, host Mandel gives a confident, succinct reply: ”Simplicity and relatability.” EW can totally relate, after going backstage for a recent Deal taping to see if it’s really that simple to make a runaway hit.

On this particular morning, executive producer Scott St. John is prepping a new contestant, Frank Panico. St. John hates to see contestants like Panico get screwed. But he knows that devastated players — who can plummet from a dream-stoking six-figure offer (I can buy my family a house!) to walking away with a pitiful two-figure prize (I can buy my family lunch at Applebee’s, if no one gets appetizers) — are the heartbreaking art of this Deal. Here’s how it works: A player first picks one of 26 cases proffered by the models. It remains shut for the duration of his time on stage — the player will either walk away from the show with the dollar amount in that briefcase (which rarely happens), or with a dollar amount offered to him by the mysterious Banker. The player generates these offers by asking the models to open the other cases one by one, each revealing a different dollar amount. As the available numbers narrow, the Banker makes sporadic calls to Mandel with his cash offers. The more big-cash cases that have been revealed and eliminated, the lower the offer, and vice versa, reflecting the changing odds of what the player’s closed case can still contain. Contestants can either take the money and end the game (Deal!) or refuse the offer and continue opening cases (No deal!).