McNutt Against the Music

So Travis and I were chatting yesterday about the Amazing Race. Our topic turned from the fact that Rob is prematurely grey to Anderson Cooper (who is also prematurely grey) and then to Anderson Cooper’s last television gig before he ended up at CNN: ABC’s The Mole.

Fitting that the conversation came out of The Amazing Race, for if the Race is the single best reality-competition show still on the air, The Mole might be the greatest reality-competition show of all time. Arriving during the infancy of “reality” television, as one of a number of shows greenlit to compete with CBS’ breakout hit Survivor, The Mole was smarter than it had any right to be. In fact, in its time MENSA – yes, the super nerds – declared it the smartest show on television.

Which might be why it failed. The show lasted for two seasons in its original incarnation, the second of which had ratings so bad that ABC pulled it a few weeks in and then re-aired it from the start as a summertime replacement. They tried to salvage the show’s concept for two more seasons as a celebrity edition, but when it stopped taking itself seriously the bottom fell out (plus Ahmad Rashad was no Anderson Cooper). The show has never returned.

Since you probably didn’t watch while it was on the air, let me explain the concept. Like in most reality-competition shows, all the contestants are strangers, sequestered somewhere in Europe. Their goal: complete a series of tasks as a team to win money for a pot that, at the end, the last contestant remaining will pocket – up to a million dollars.

But here’s the twist. One of the contestants isn’t trying to win money at all; instead, they’ve been hired by ABC to try and do their best to sabotage the team’s efforts at cash collecting. None of the contestants (or us, for that matter) know the identity of the mole; in fact, their number one objective is to try and figure out who it is. Throughout the show, they keep journals documenting their thoughts and observations, charting every suspicion and intrigue. Then, every three days, every contestant takes a ten-question multiple-choice quiz about the mole’s identity. The person who gets the lowest score is out of the game. In the end, the game comes down to the final three: a winner who takes the pot, a loser who gets nothing, and the mole.

The concept is good, but the execution (sometimes-cheesy production values aside) that makes The Mole so rewarding. For starters, the level of intrigue and strategy that takes place far outpaces every other competition out there. Not only do you have a mole trying to screw things up while remaining hidden, but at the same time other players are doing their best to attract attention to themselves or others, to throw people off the track if they think they know who the Mole is.

Not only that, but the producers had a knack for being creative with the tasks. Sure, some of them are basic physical tasks, but some are mindgames, some are amazingly complex, and some of them are completely unannounced. Take this one from season two: at dinner one night, one of the pieces of cake doesn’t have a blueberry on top. The person who takes this piece has no idea, but they’ve been chosen for a secret assignment. That night, Anderson comes to their room and offers that person and their roommate an exemption from the next day’s elimination. Their mission? Convince two other players to leave their hotel room and come to theirs – a violation of the rules that will lead to a financial hit for the team. Another famous task involves a player being kidnapped in the middle of the night, with the players waking up to find that they have a certain period of time to track them down and rescue them. Of course, some are more traditional, Amazing-Race-roadblock kind of stuff, but it’s the more inventive ones that stick with you, proof that these writers knew how to make one hell of a mind game.

Now, the Mole’s first season was its best – despite only having ten players, it was slightly preferable to season two, which was a little more sensationalist and not nearly as cerebral. But only season one is currently available on DVD.

However, while looking around for a video to post with this threat, I found the YouTube profile of SirensEmbrace, a lovely human being who it seems has every episode of season two on tape and has been uploading them to YouTube over the past couple of months. This seriously made my day; now, you and I can watch the whole thing. I’ll post the entire first episode here for your viewing pleasure; you can watch the rest of them here at YouTube; subscribe to their videos or keep checking back to his/her video page for the rest of the season.

Watch: The Mole: The Next Betrayal – Episode One

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