If the show does a second season, I think what would really help the proceedings along is revamping the Showcase Showdown. What they have in place is somewhat broken.
For the benefit of those outside of Canada who haven't seen this yet, since there are only four pricing games played, all four contestants spin the wheel during the same showdown and whichever two contestants are the closest to $1.00 without going over advance to the Showcase with the closest one getting the option to bid/pass on the first showcase.
Rather than have the top winner spin last like on the daytime show, the contestants spin in order of who played their game first. That's strike one, really, because the first person on stage is now getting essentially penalized for being on stage first. The second strike is this business of the top two spinners being on standby. As we saw last night, if the first two spinners go over $1.00, then the last two are automatically advanced to the showcase, again, not by merit of having won the most, but just because of when they happened to get on stage. How last night's show handled this situation was a mess, as well. Now the last two spinners are spinning to decide who will get the bid/pass option in the Showcase.
The third spinner ended up with 60 cents on the first spin and was given the option by Howie to take a second spin. This is the third strike on how this is bad game design because what if they went over $1.00 on the second spin? Would the fourth player just win the showcase by default? If there was a rule of "you get one spin to determine who goes first in the Showcase and/or to see if you can get $1.00 for the $1,000 bonus", it was not stated on air. Howie specifically said "You can spin again if you want to." Now, in fairness, it did look like there was an edit when the fourth player spun a nickel on her spin - I wonder if Howie told her she could spin again and they stopped tape to tell him that wouldn't be permitted and they just forgot to edit out the earlier mention of him telling the third contestant he could spin again if he wanted (without getting too much into the details of the show I attended yet, there was at least one instance of a stop tape because Howie was a bit unfamiliar with the rules of one of the games necessitating a reshoot).
There's a reason why the Showcase Showdown works the way it does and has been unchanged since 1975. The rules simply work. If the producers of The Price is Right Tonight need to adapt the Showcase Showdown to accommodate four contestants instead of six, I would say what would be a FAR better solution would be to have two groups of two - have the first two players spin in the first group with the top winner spinning last. Whoever comes out on top there goes to the Showcase. Rinse and repeat with the second group of two and again, the top winner of the night gets the bid/pass option on Showcase #1. I would say they can still do the Showdown after all four pricing games are played, they don't necessarily need to do two Showdowns like on the daytime show but the current rules are quite broken.
Just my $0.02.
