Planners of "Greed," the Fox Television Network's big money game show, have passed over Dartmouth in their search for Ivy League students to compete in a series of college tournaments to be aired in May.
Contestant coordinators for the show, the top prize of which is $2 million, have been travelling to universities across the country for the past month in their search for student contestants.
The show's coordinating producer Laura Chambers said there were probably several reasons that Dartmouth students did not get a chance to try out. She indicated, among other things, that planners were "looking for big name" schools since the primary purpose of the tournament is, after all, to increase the number of viewers.
She cited Dartmouth's rural location and its small size as compared to the other Ivy League schools as other potential reasons the College was not included in the search, as well as spring break.
Dartmouth's two-week-long spring break fell in the middle of the contestant search, which may also have played a part, Chambers said, since the group that travelled around the country conducting the tryouts may not have been able to fit Dartmouth into their schedule.
The college editions of the game show will feature teams from the Ivy League, the Pac-10, the Atlantic Coast Conference and the Big-10, and will attempt to take advantage of the rivalries that exist between the member schools of each conference, Chambers said.
Tryouts were held last month at Columbia, Harvard, Princeton, Yale and Brown Universities, as well as at the University of Pennsylvania. Cornell University and Dartmouth were the only two Ivies that did not receive visits by the television crews.
Those auditioning for spots on the game show faced a qualifying trivia test quiz and then a one-on-one interview with a member of the "Greed" staff.
Attendance at the various college tryouts has ranged from just 25 students at Penn to more than a thousand when the auditions were held at Purdue University in Indiana.
Two to four students from each university will be selected next week to compete on the show. Winners will be flown to Los Angeles for the taping of the shows, which will be aired during the spring television sweeps.
"Members of [one of the six-person teams formed for the show] during the college tournament will be from different schools within a given conference to take advantage of the rivalry that exists between the schools," Chambers said.
One of the six people on the team is eliminated immediately. The five remaining team members answer trivia questions for amounts beginning at $25,000, a figure that doubles with each question answered correctly by the designated competitor and approved by the team's "captain."
Once the $100,000 mark is reached, and after each question from then on, "terminator" rounds begin, in which one randomly selected contestant has the opportunity to go head-to-head with another contestant on a single question. Whoever wins gets to keep the other person's share of the final prize.
"Greed," Fox's answer to ABC's "Who Wants To Be A Millionaire," airs on Fridays at 9 p.m.