The current version of Family Feud is so broken as an actual game. As stated elsewhere in this thread, games are never over in less than four questions, despite the fact that in a survey of 100 people, logically there should be enough points for a family to win by sweeping (i.e. playing the game well) three questions. This leads to infuriating situations where a family will have zero going into the triple question, win that round with a steal and then win the game by winning the sudden death question...
...which leads to the next broken aspect of the game - the sudden death question. Horrible. I understand why they have it because of the truncated time constraints but it's certainly a game breaking mechanic. If they wanted to get around that, another triple value question could be played with no more than three answers on the board and follow the old Dawson/Combs era rule of the question being read once and not repeated with three seconds to answer it. Round could be over in less than a minute.
More to the point, if they wanted to speed the game up, I'd be getting rid of the pass or play rule as was done on the Combs show. If you didn't want to play the question, why bother answering it in the first place? How much time is lost in the show on every question watching the families debate whether they want to play or not?
Then there's Fast Money. The producers of the current show have never been able to get this part of the show right AT ALL, either because the hosts they've had over the years are bad at hosting (Richard Karn was the worst offender) or because they force losses so often to prevent families from winning more than $40,000 or because they refuse to allow 200 points to be totaled up by one player or because they insist on wasting so much time explaining the rules of the round (Dawson and Combs were the best at getting the second player on stage and getting immediately into asking the questions).
And to further this rant about how much I dislike the current run of Family Feud, goes without saying that winning five dollars a point for losing at Fast Money is in desperate need of updating.
Also, have you ever noticed they use fake shots of the board during Fast Money? Take a close look at the fixed shot of the board next time you watch - where's the scoreboard above the main board? It's been completely edited out for some unknown reason.
Speaking of editing, the editing is so out of control on the show now that it's hard to accept any of it as genuine. How many times have they started the game and then they will cut to some interaction between Steve and a contestant that clearly took place before the game even started? (i.e. the Family Feud logo is visible on the board, Steve doesn't have the question card, etc.)
And these are complaints about the show that don't even include how lewd the questions/answers have become.
The truly sad part is Harvey probably gets paid millions a year to host this show for maybe seven or eight weeks a year and will soon eclipse Richard Dawson's tenure with it.
I hate this show, if that wasn't made abundantly clear.
