I’ve been on a game show kick here on GONY lately, and while The Price is Right may not be your thing, classic Password was among the nerdiest American game shows ever to see air.¹ The set was spare, the prizes were modest, and the game was simple: Using one word clues, get your partner to guess the “password.”

The original 1960s Password and most of its later incarnations were hosted by Allen Ludden, a great emcee with trademark plastic-rimmed glasses and an all-American face that belonged on a box of soda crackers. Ludden’s style was laconic and erudite, fitting a polite game of literacy.

The Password remake airing Sundays on CBS, with the obligatory “Million Dollar!” qualifier, is not so polite, and not so literate, but it’s better than I expected. Fremantle Media, the production juggernaut behind American Idol and other game/reality shows, holds the rights to the late Mark Goodson’s classic game-show formats. Fremantle has abused this privilege in recent years. It’s hard to say which earned Fremantle greater enmity from game-show fans: their despicably trashy 1998 Match Game revival, or their joyless 2001 mangling of Card Sharks.

Unlike those train wrecks, the creators of MDP have stuck to the essence of the original show, even dispensing with the “solve a password to solve a puzzle” wrinkle of Password Plus and Super Password, which aired in the late 1970s and 1980s. MDP is nothing but pure passwords, and they come rapid-fire, which is especially welcome in a world of “We’ll…open the…suitcase…right after…these…messages….”

Host Regis Philbin’s bombastic style couldn’t be less like Allen Ludden, which has generated some rancor among aficionados of the genre, but Philbin is one of the smoothest old-school broadcasters around, so it works for me. The real shame is that vast stretches of Regis’s participation in the show are relegated to post-production voiceovers. You can tell that dialogue was added in post when the timbre of Philbin’s voice suddenly changes and they don’t show him on camera while he’s speaking. This happens way too much in the first two episodes of MDP, and it’s not right for a talented ad-libber like Philbin. (This isn’t the only audio problem with MDP; relentless shrieks from the crowd, obviously sweetened in post, make the show an aurally exhausting experience.)

The celebrity guests have been a mixed bag, but again, better than expected overall. The producers made the effort to find skilled Password-playing celebrities—half the time. The first week saw a very sharp Neil Patrick Harris face off against Rachael Ray, who at times seemed unaware that she was even on a game show, or on Earth, for that matter. Similarly, Rosie O’Donnell outplayed her opponent on the second episode, a nervous Tony Hawk. A special episode to air tomorrow (Thursday) features Betty White, who may be old but is one of the best Password players of all time. (Her opponent is Susie Essman, who seems like she could be a dark horse.)

MDP’s bonus game sees contestants attempting passwords of increasing difficulty as they work their way up that now-familiar gimmick, the Who Wants to be a Millionaire-type “money tree.” This would be a fine game if it weren’t for the fact that MDP doesn’t let games spill over into the next episode like Millionaire and all its knockoffs do.

The upshot of this strange decision—playing a game of supposedly variable length in a set one-hour slot—is that toward the end of the show, the tension can disappear by virtue of looking at the clock. The second contestant to play the bonus game started her quest with about ten minutes to go in the hour, and it was obvious that she wouldn’t have time to make it even close to the million. (As expected, she crapped out after a couple rounds.)

The spoiler-by-time-slot aspect of the show is a huge problem, but put that and the grating loudness aside, and there’s a cerebral game under here. Game shows too often get a bum rap for being mindless entertainment, and primetime game shows of late have too often fit that bill. Kudos to Million Dollar Password for making us think, at least a little.

Million Dollar Password airs Sundays at 8:00 p.m. Eastern time on CBS. A special episode airs tomorrow, June 12, also at 8:00.

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1. I say “American” game shows not to come off as some sort of cosmopolitan game-show elitist, but rather because I’ve seen plenty of British game shows that offer a stronger concoction of low budget and bookishness than most of what we’ve ever offered stateside. Search YouTube for Countdown and 15 to 1 to see what I mean. ↑