For me, the jury is out on the new series of Deal but having said that, there’s been some good moments and drama which is what helped make the show a success the first time around.

But there’s some things I’ve noticed that need to be addressed in my opinion. Firstly, are players not allowed to swap boxes anymore?

What’s with the offers too? Especially the AMO ones. Feels very 2005 like with low offers at the start and insanely generous ones at the end!

The offers are very random too and usually have to be x thousand, y hundred rather than ‘straight’ figures.

I don’t mind the three-box offer simply because it became a de-facto gameplay feature in later years especially with the big money involved. So we’re kind of used to it.

I wonder if there’ll be a second series?

I agree with everything you've written there, and I believe there is going to be a second series (or a first series? Or a third series?!)...

I have to say being an old-school Dond-er the three-box offer still doesn't sit quite right with me, but it would've been so useful in so many games in the original run and saved an awful lot of people a huge loss (I keep coming back to the bloke, but 1p Trevor - his last box was the QM, he's looking at at least £30,000 at 3-box with 1p, £250 and £250,000 remaining. He deals, takes out the £250k, legendary player, perfect result).
I'm glad there's no offer prediction, that's one gimmick I genuinely detest. Mainly because I'm just terrible at predicting stuff.

I love the offers sometimes, they do seem to hark back to the very early days, £22,900 or £17,300 or £6,700 or whatever, my brain would prefer figures rounded to the nearest hundred but hey, that's just the way my brain works!
It's interesting to note that the AMOs aren't in live play, and live offers seem not to come close to the mean at all, which is a departure from the original DoND's early patterns of course. Whether we'll see an AMO in live play...someone's got to go all the way for that to happen, you feel, and as we saw in the first batch of shows, at the moment we tend to be socially liberal but fiscally ultra-conservative, so I think it'll take somebody who is already comfortably-off to take the game to 2-box! And if the candidates being selected are only those who could really do with a bit of extra cash, perhaps that scenario will be far less common than in the original show...

To be fair we are seeing several inflated offers in live play (such as Michelle's 30k on 2 blues/100k and Simon's 15k on blue/4k/50k), the only reason we're not seeing the AMO 2 box offers in live play is the offers are so generous even before then that no rational player would reach that point in live play with the big money in play.

As for the 3 box offer, I'm personally on board with it, it makes it more tempting to go on at 5 box, and going all the way from 5 box to 2 box without an offer on the original version always felt like a flaw with the format. I certainly prefer them having a 3 box offer in every game to the Banker offering one box at a time on occasion as a gimmick like in the later years of the Channel 4 run!

This is a lot longer that I intended to be! I agree with your points danielbaker1992. There will almost certainly be a second series as the show pulled in around two million viewers on average.

There are several things that I like about the new version:

The board is not a clone of the original version. We've had 3,000 games with the original board and there isn't much to offer from it. Don't get me wrong, I have a fond spot for it, but it's just like having vanilla ice cream all the time.

The three-box offer is a novelty that works with the new board structure. Because there are only four large amounts, the board will usually become unexciting with two boxes left (two-thirds with £10k or less, in fact).

No gimmicks. Box 23 is gone. Guessing what the offers will be; or awkward 'deal' buttons which reveal information that should be private; a thing of the past. (Some twists weren't bad per se. E.g. the confusingly-named "Banker's Gamble"; or some 'theme weeks'.)

Stephen is a good presenter and knows what he's doing. He has the tendency of taking up too much of the limelight compared with the other players. There's a genuine connection developing between him and the new Banker, which is essential.

(The original Deal was never the same after Glenn Hugill left, about the same time that Box 23 arrived. The connection between his replacement and Noel wasn't the same, with a noticeable character change. If you are reading, Glenn, thank you so much for giving us so many years of memories and enjoyment.)

The presentation and set are fine. It's a bit of a weird mishmash at the moment with the titles doing one thing and the set and board using hexagons as a motif, but it works.

The things that I dislike:

The first two offers are so low as to be insulting. Because there are seven offers instead of six, the Banker can be lazy at the start and not be punished. The game is basically irrelevant until half of the boxes have been opened.

(This was the case in the original, with no-one dealing the first offer and only one person dealing the second. They had a purpose in being somewhat tempting, even with the applied pressure of continuing by Noel and others.)

Then there is the linear offer structure. In general, most offers are simply better each time relative to the mean, regardless of what happens. This is not as much Player versus Banker as Player versus Spreadsheet. Does it matter what the amount is offered to the nearest £10?

The above-mean-offers are dire. For a pilot of 20 shows (plus 2 celebrity shows), a lot of games had the Banker make no attempt to eke out any saving at 2-box, even when the offers were theoretical. He was quite content at effectively giving some players arbitrary freebies, removing any semblance of game theory - or even game - from the show.

(This could only make sense if the show absolutely had to keep under budget as it was 'scared money'.)

Does the show actually work with £100,000 as the top prize? What would people deal at with two boxes in 2024 that is below the mean? Pilots are meant to resolve these questions, yet we don't know. (Add to that the near-mean offers towards the end which are also excessively generous.)

The game isn't so much as what the Player wins as what the Banker saves. The Banker is the real player of the show, and must work out how best to play their opponent.

Needless to say the average amount on the board is too low. I don't understand the thought process behind it, other than the fact that the show has likely outperformed expectations at ITV. The downturn in advertising has contributed, but this change is harsh.

Perhaps there were green eyes in ITV, thinking that Deal would challenge existing shows and so had to have its wings clipped? Or some weird kind of progressivism where players have to be protected from losing large amounts of money by... not giving them much of a chance to win large amounts?

A win of £10,000 is still very good, but that's on offer on many ITV game shows already. It all feels like an unforced error and will mean that the show is cut short early by one or two years.

The reds could be doubled in value, either for the charity editions or for normal games as well. It could extend the life of the show considerably for the relatively small cost increase in production.

My main concern:

The greatest danger to the show is apathy. With a more restricted subset of the population interested in applying due to the lower amounts on offer, we won't have the same diversity of players on the show and the stories and personalities will become too similar.

It's important for the show's makers to know that not every player should have a happy ending, as tough as that sounds. (Give them all the support that they need afterwards, by all means.)

People watch not because the struggle is easy, but because they can watch what would happen without being negatively affected by the consequences of the actions unfolding. A game of second-guessing and opportunity and calculation of the risks involved. For that brief moment, for one hour, rich and poor viewers alike, we are connected.

At the moment I think the show has one or two series in it, so around 300 shows. It could make double that with changes.

Last thoughts:

The show still works. I fear that without changes, it will resort to gimmicks and encourage players to gamble more and more, until it gets cancelled for something else altogether.

That said, I'm still going to watch and see if it works out. There's no show quite like it on the telly where things are as unpredictable and produce so many emotions and memories. Good luck to the team behind it and all possible success.

Coming into this revival, my biggest feeling was that the show almost had to decide what it meant to exist in 2023, without a host who defined the format in this country for better and worse, how much of that energy to keep and how much of it to jettison as baggage.

Honestly, I don't think they know either - and sometimes that's fascinating itself. There's 2005-like offers and pregame explanations like it's a brand new show, but then there's references to the Channel 4 era casually dropped into proceedings - even such lore as the "1p club" - and that just makes the lower prize money seem like even more of a false economy. I can't help but wonder if ITV might have been better off going for the OG board and a less-known host - quite possibly a cost-neutral move overall relative to the £100k/Mulhern setup they actually did - but the way the ratings have gone for this first run is validation in itself, and I think it may well have helped that the gameplay was so erratic, making the viewer uncertain what the player would do even though the offer structure created a "play for the endgame generosity" meta that was super obvious for the likes of us.

Which leads me onto the second element of "what does it mean for DoND to exist in the mid-2020s?" - how the actual gameplay would work. When I first saw the £100k board, my immediate reaction was "oh that might actually be sneakily good because on the £250k board, in 2023, with a responsible host, there'd be so many early Deals?" I didn't know then, of course, that the offers would go full 2005, and I still wonder what the gameplay would have looked like if either that or the board were different. Maybe we'll find out in 2024! But ultimately, it felt like for half of that initial run people just did whatever would have worked in the game before theirs, to a greater extent even than I recall in the C4 era - and it was absolutely a dynamic then, at least after box wins of either extreme. The variance in offer generosity between contestants felt vindictive at times to me then (although me then was a uni-age autistic economics geek whose actual arrival at uni was delayed in part by family and others persuading me I wasn't ready to live independently at 18 or even 19, so I was viewing the show from a quite distinct angle); its absence in 2023 felt awkward in another way, not helped by the utter clunkiness of the four-figure 3sf offers. I'd have loved to have been a consultant on this revival on the offer-creation side of things!

DoND in a recessionary environment isn't new - and part of the intrigue of 2008-on episodes was the show working through that in real time, Noel flipping between empathy and manipulation, seemingly torn between a thousand impulses with conflicting implications for his ultimate driving force of "stop at nothing to make exciting television" - but DoND in a post-Brexit environment is, and honestly the single biggest thing I'm most impressed with ITV DoND pulling off is seemingly recreating the wing cameraderie of old in a period of increasingly intense cultural division. Whatever else the people behind this show got wrong or right, the casting team deserve a ton of credit IMO.

I feel like the ultimate lesson of this revival's success is that DoND, played straight, is still a winning format for today's daytime audiences. I hope that's a lesson that ITV et al. do not choose to forget.

I'll make it a hat-trick of veterans, even though I'd already commented in this thread so it's not quite the novelty it may otherwise have been - simply to add to the record my agreement with the sage words of the two who wrote before me.