“We leave no trail for them.” – Rebecca
Going into “The South Beach Sisters”, the third episode of ABC’s Take The Money and Run, I was pretty sure I knew how the game was going to play out. In the first episode, the interrogators got the best of the hiders. In the second episode, the hiders were a step ahead of the detectives. So I figured it was a pretty safe bet that the third episode to air would feature the detectives scoring a win. By evenly distributing the winners, proponents of the show can say to critics (like myself) who argue that the rules of the game are unfair and poorly developed, “See, look, anything can happen. Everybody has an equal chance of winning!”
And of course I was right. The detectives find the briefcase and win the $100,00. I’m not saying this to gloat or to toot my own horn, I’m merely trying to demonstrate that Take The Money and Run is both transparent and contrived at the same time — a lethal combination for a game show built on mystery and deception.
As the episode title would indicate, last night’s hiders were sisters Rebecca and Jennie. The detectives tasked with hunting down their hidden case were Officers Manny and Jorge of the Miami Police Department. The sisters had a pretty solid plan to win the game: leave no evidence. “We aren’t making any phone calls, we’re not sending any text messages, we aren’t spending any of the money. We leave no trail for them,” Rebbecca said as they jumped into the SUV. Rebbecca was clearly the brains of the operation and Jennie was the weak link, and the sisters knew that. To minimize the damage that Jennie could cause in interrogation, the girls came up with the smart idea to have her close her eyes when they approached the hiding spot. She couldn’t spill the beans even if she wanted to. The sisters basically did everything right, but yet they lost. Why? Because they chose a hiding spot that was way too easy to find.
Rebecca and Jennie decided to stop the SUV at a dead-end street in an area full of over-grown bushes and trees. They got out and walked a few yards and hid the case in the bushes. When Manny and Jorge followed the route the sisters took, they immediately recognized the dead-end street as a likely hiding place. “[The interrogators] can talk to them all they want, it’s the searching that’s going to find it,” Jorge said. He was right, the interrogators were virtually irrelevant in this game. Since the detectives were almost positive they knew where to look for the case, they were able to spend most of the time searching instead of waiting around for information. Manny and Jorge rented a metal detector and swept the area around the dead-end street. Before long, they dug the case out of the brush and were $100,000 richer.
Lingering thoughts on “The South Beach Sisters”:
- Ratings for Take The Money and Run were down a whopping 22% since last week. This is bad news for the show and for ABC, but great news for anyone who has to sit through this drek on weekly basis. If this ratings trend continues, it shouldn’t be long before the network mercifully pulls the plug.
This review originally appeared on TV Geek Army.