I think I heard Rich say "Morning, Drew" at the beginning of the show. Kind of funny since the show ended up airing at night.
If they knew the next contestant was coming from the Army, then why was the camera pointed at the Marines when Rich called the name?
I liked that the colored strips around the doors were only changing between red, white and blue for this episode.
But overall, this is why I've scaled back on watching the show. I watched last Friday's show to see if anything had improved and tonight's show because it was special enough to air at night, but the thing that gets to me is that I can see the classic Price is Right buried in there. For every little thing that I see that reminds me of what makes the show special, there's something like the introduction of the home gym or the beginning of the Belgium description that drive home the fact that somebody there who's calling the shots, whether it's Drew or Syd or whoever, doesn't understand what does and doesn't work on this show, and they're trying to do all of these things. I'm sure that they think that they're improving the show with these changes, but so many of them just come off as random and confusing. Nobody at home truly thought that the first showcase was going to end with just the dining room and the video games. Why call so much attention to it? By doing so, they've simultaneously insulted themselves for looking like they forgot to end the showcase with something "good" and insulted the intelligence of the viewers for supposedly not realizing that there would be another prize in the showcase.
I feel the frustration of the people who might be considered to have a constantly negative opinion of the show. I can see what isn't working, and I believe that if they got rid of those things that aren't working, then the show would return to being the show that I used to love escaping to. But it's just no fun to watch the show even once a week and seeing the wasted potential.
I hate being such a downer. To end on a positive note, I'll say that I liked that they were saluting the military and I can even see what they were trying to go for by always having a person from each of the four branches in Contestants Row. Although the branch that wins the show is the branch that wins the showcase, not the branch that gets the most contestants onstage. Having the band there was great, and I liked that the band played the appropriate music depending on which branch had a contestant onstage. I don't know that this felt like a nighttime episode, since it wasn't intended to be one, but overall, it did feel like a very special daytime episode.