A 007-themed reality show seemed hard to fathom, but Amazon Prime made it clear. Click here to find out if it was good and whether we’ll get a second season.
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Anyone who watches a Bond movie wishes they could be James Bond.
Whether it’s Daniel Craig cruising down the canals of Venice, or Sean Connery wooing beautiful women in a five-star Floridian resort, every Bond actor gets to play out our ultimate fantasies: to be smart, attractive, wealthy, well-clothed, cool, suave, and whose job it is to rid the world of evil villains.
Sadly, achieving that dream is a tall ask for most of us. But with Amazon Prime’s new game show, 007: Road to a Million, it has become a little easier. The adventure show, starring Brian Cox as “The Controller”, offers nine contestants the chance to win a jackpot prize of £1 million – won through completing various James Bond-inspired challenges in several lavish locations. Basically, if you want the money, you have to channel your inner 007 to get it.
The Concept of 007: Road to a Million
In principle, this is a good idea. There is a big audience for this kind of thing, emphasised by best-selling 007 games like GoldenEye 007, Nightfire, and Blood Stone. That, coupled with the rise in popularity of date-night adventure activities like Ninja Warrior and Escape Rooms, mean the premise of a James Bond game show is a potential winner.
The franchise has produced many memorable, breathtaking sequences that can be adapted to the game show format. For instance, Casino Royale’s casino scene, where Bond faces off against Le Chiffre, has been adapted in a convincing and enthralling way in other adaptations, but the show doesn’t really home in on it, despite the casino scene being one of the most memorable of the entire franchise.
Some of the most evocative adaptations of Casino Royale are found in the casinos themselves. Land-based casinos have long sought to emulate the glamour, intrigue, and cinematography of Daniel Craig’s day, and that same frisson can be hard to replicate in other circumstances. For example, while bank transfer is a popular method at online casinos, their brick-and-mortar counterparts can rely on that clatter of chips on the felt of the blackjack table to create a multi-sensory and dramatic experience.
In a real world, game-show adaptation of James Bond, even capturing an iota of the enthralling nature of the protagonist’s high-stakes casino visits would make the series a smash hit. Unfortunately, however, this was not something 007: Road to a Million was able to do.
This is one of the main sticking points for the series as a whole; the stakes need to be kept high or it doesn’t feel like the world of James Bond at all. This is where the Road to a Million starts to unravel a little – the stakes aren’t high, and the challenges aren’t attached to the same level of risk we’re used to seeing in the movies.
Despite some expert direction – the shots of Venice and the Swiss Alps might as well have been plucked out of Casino Royale and On Her Majesty’s Secret Service – the action-packed, deadly nature of James Bond’s life as a 007 agent is never efficiently emulated.
Low Stakes and Lukewarm Missions
Take the first episode. We start things off in Scotland. For those who don’t know, this is James Bond’s home country, so it makes a lot of sense that this is where our contestants will begin their first mission. But instead of kicking things off in the infamous SkyFall manor, we watch the contestants trample awkwardly over hills and dip into lochs, scantily clad. There isn’t any real danger or reason for why they are doing such things. For the most part, they just have to take part in these soulless challenges to get a chance at answering a question – non-Bond related – and advance to the next country.
Now, we’re not saying that the contestants should have been tied to a metal table and forced to tell all their secrets before a laser cuts them in half. But to get viewers hooked on a show like this, there needs to be some sense of peril or tension. You might think this is achieved with a few missions. At one point, the contestants must head into a tarantula cage and inside a crocodile compound to get to the next question, and although these are the best missions of the show, they’re not massively adrenaline-inducing when you consider how many safety experts are waiting in the wings.
Unfortunately, this show never reaches further than its surface level. It’s glitzy, for sure. You can tell that from the 007: Road to a Million trailer alone. Brian Cox plays a good villain in “The Controller”, and as mentioned before, locations like the Amazon and Venice are captured beautifully. But if this is about channelling your inner 007, then it hardly lives up to its premise. The contestants only ever channel their inner George Lazenby, and even that’s a bit of a stretch.
A Second Season?
For those who watched, you’ll know that no one was James Bond enough to walk away with the full £1 million jackpot. Brian Cox leaves us on a bit of a cliffhanger, suggesting that there will be a second season on the way. Whether that will happen, however, remains to be seen. Technically, the show was renewed even before the first show aired. But Amazon has a habit of changing their minds, and given the less-than-friendly reviews and the low streaming figures, it’s going to be a mission for the producers to keep the ball rolling – perhaps even a mission that James Bond himself cannot complete.