007: Road to a Million Season 2 is a Massive Improvement

The first season of 007: Road to a Million wasn’t very fun. You’d think a show that transplants regular people into a James Bond adventure would be entertaining to watch but somehow the series was achingly slow and dour, taking on the worst aspects of the modern films. Thankfully, the second season is a huge improvement. It’s not perfect, but now that there’s a little more distance from the end of the Craig era, and a willingness to embrace some silliness and broader aspects, the game show has become a fun watch.

Finally, the back catalogue of Bond has been deemed open season. There’s the islands in Thailand from The Man with the Golden Gun, the Vienna Ferris Wheel from The Living Daylights, and whatever the weird temple thing from Licence to Kill is. And yes, there are still the Craig era locations, like a yellow-filtered Mexico City and dark and gloomy London, but there’s a good mix. There are easter eggs and references for fans, which actually includes the contestants this time. The participants recognise the locations from the films, or giddily pick up props like Scaramanga’s gun. It’s great that this season isn’t so ashamed of the fact that it’s a James Bond game show. There’re even a few blasts of some classic Bond scores, although still not enough for my taste.

The first season took far too long to get going. Seriously, there were about three hour-long episodes introducing all the pairs where nothing happened but climbing a hill and spending 10-minutes answering the easiest questions ever. The second season is so much faster. The episodes are 30-odd minutes and we meet everyone while they are in the midst of a mission. The in-depth intros are saved for a middle episode where the remaining teams are tasked with finding out information about their opponents: the usually boring stuff wisely turned into a fun game.

This episode could easily have sunk the show but I thought it was handled relatively well. This is modern reality TV, the contestants are going to have tragic pasts to an extent, revealed at times best suited to manipulate the audience. Dedicating an entire episode to this is risky. What made it work is that the reactions to this information felt genuine. People were getting emotional over finding out things about each other. And it felt less like the producers had picked people with tragic backstories and more that everyone has something in their past, or present, that stings, and these things can be related to. Or, in the case of the sisters, them coming to the realisation they basically have no life experience compared to everyone else was a nice moment. It toed the line well. At least until the quiz at the end where information like what age Dylan was when he was diagnosed with autism was literally trivialised.

Having all the contestants in the same location, letting them interact and meet the Controller at the start does wonders for the show. Everyone felt separated in the first season, not feeling like adversaries in the same competition, and that is vastly improved in the second. Last season I didn’t care who won. This time I definitely did. There are heroes and villains; people to root for and people to boo. I was championing Dylan and his dad, like a lot of people, I imagine, while Rob and Alex were the pantomime baddies. I’m sure it was played up for the cameras, and purposely edited, but Alex might be the most irritating, obnoxious man I’ve ever seen. And the show is ten times better for his inclusion. I’ll remember him and I certainly don’t remember a single competitor from the first season.

The show is still slightly awkward in how wants to both act like a James Bond film, taking itself seriously and almost existing in the world of the films, mentioning the “Carver Media Group Network” like it’s a real thing, and then embracing that it’s just a fun game show. This dissonance is most prominent in all the scenes with Brian Cox as the Controller. The first season treated him like a Bond villain while in the second he’s basically M, with background actors and underling Sophia acting like it’s a real mission while Cox himself occasionally breaks the fourth wall. It’s all very weird and I don’t find it necessary. Of course he’s not the one on the phone to the contestants, his stuff was probably filmed in a single afternoon and edited in. The producers could get rid of Cox and probably save half the show’s budget. Although I did like the addition of the psychologist from Skyfall, Doctor Hall.

But a key part of the concept of putting ordinary people into a James Bond production is the production, so the overproduced aspects work better here than in other examples of this kind of show. It’s part of the fun that it’s presented at least somewhat like a Bond film and the hours of health-and-safety lectures and training are edited out, and the uber dramatic walking away from explosions are made to look spontaneous. The production style certainly fits Bond better than something like the BBC’s Destination X, which I thought would be a fun geo-guessing game but turned out to be a massively overproduced, overdramatic show desperately wanting to be The Traitors despite not being set up for it. Part of the joy here is pretending to be James Bond, although not everyone can pull that off as Ricky and Noddy proved when they wore those hats in Mexico.

If there’s one big area for improvement left, it’s the elimination tasks. The core challenges themselves are fun but the producers still haven’t worked out the best way to eliminate people. Coming last should just be it but sending the two losers into some final contest almost always ends up feeling anticlimactic. The first elimination of the season saw two pairs meet at a boxing ring and I thought, ‘wow, they’re going to make them fight?!’ Of course not, it ended up being a lame quiz question that had nothing to do with James Bond. At least make the questions James Bond trivia rather than La Llorona lore.

The bluffing game is fine once but then that came back for a best-of-three round in the finale that was basically just ‘Carrot in a Box’, immortalised by Sean Locke. At least the lame shooting challenge, which doesn’t feel real at all because they are clearly not actually shooting bullets, was gotten out of the way early rather than saved for the final task like last season. Although turning the final task into a clip show wasn’t great either, but at least it felt personal to the contestants and I was surprised by the outcome. And the pairs get to keep the money they win so, even if the million remains elusive, it doesn’t feel like a huge waste of time like season 1 did.

The long wait for a new James Bond film continues, with the property now in the hands of a megacorporation and its future quality uncertain. With a new actor still not cast and director Denis Villeneuve still a Dune film away from beginning work on Bond 26, we’re in for another few years of 007 hinterland. I thought the first season of 007: Road to a Million was a pretty poor way to fill it. But the second season was a huge improvement and I’m surprised by how eager I am for more. I’ll happily take another season to keep the franchise’s flame perhaps not burning but flickering.