key is the key

The promos for "Treasure Hunters" made it look like a show that I might like. It promised a mixture of "The Amazing Race" and "National Treasure" with a little bit of "The Da Vinci Code" mixed in. The show doesn't have the thrills of "The Amazing Race." In fact, the traveling is mostly edited out. One episode began with a contestant saying, "We get back to New York from France..." as all the remaining teams piled into the same limo. They do a little bit of racing to find the next clue but it then takes the teams some time to solve the puzzles.

My wife told me that the show was getting more interesting so I caught up with several episodes on the TiVo. The show's host is Laird Macintosh. Something about Laird bothers me. It could be his stilted delivery. It could be that he seems to already know the answers to the ancient riddles that the contestants must solve, making the whole treasure hunt moot. I might like Laird better if he were able to use some of his comedic skills from the "Planet of the Apes" parody group he's in. There were too many contestants at the beginning of "Treasure Hunters." As teams get eliminated, it's easier to keep track of who's left in the game and to root for (or against) a specific team. The final episode is on tomorrow night. It includes a live broadcast from Washington, DC. At the end of last week's episode, the teams were finding a supposedly ancient chamber under Baltimore. The room looked like the show's set designers had barely finished painting it.

The winners will receive a prize worth millions from Genworth Financial. The value of the prize will be revealed during the finale. The Genworth press release made me think that the prize might be a retirement account rather than cash. Perhaps the value depends on the ages of the winners. Had you ever heard of Genworth before? Apparently the company spun off from GE, the parent company of NBC.

As my daughter and I were sightseeing on Tuesday, we came upon a cameraman on the National Mall. He told us that he was shooting footage for the finale of the online portion of "Treasure Hunters." We looked in the direction his camera was pointing and we saw a camera crew walking backwards to film a contestant. They repeated the process with another participant while the remaining contestants waited. If you've been following the game, maybe you'll recognize some of the "Treasure Challenge Finalists" in these photos.