Our Little Genius is an unaired game show that was created by Mark Burnett, and was originally scheduled to premiere January 13, 2010, on Fox. Hosted by Kevin Pollak, the series was to feature children answering questions on expert subjects to win money for their families, with their parents able to ask experts for advice.
A week ahead of its scheduled premiere, Fox pulled Our Little Genius from its schedule, with Burnett stating that he had concerns over the integrity of the program, as contestants had received more information than they should have. A complaint to the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) the following month, as well as accounts in 2021 by a former contestant, suggested that the producers of Our Little Genius had provided contestants with information regarding specific questions they were being asked during their game, and were allowing contestants who lost on the early levels of the game to try again from the beginning with new questions.
The show would be shelved indefinitely and never made it to air.
Gameplay
Child prodigies aged between 6 and 12 years old are asked increasingly difficult questions within subjects of their expertise, with correct answers rewarding money for the child's family. Based on the difficulty of the next question, the parents and a panel of experts determine whether they will move on, or if they will walk away with their current winnings.
The child faces a maximum of 10 multi-part, open-ended questions. The category for each question is shown beforehand for the child's parents, not the child, to make a decision on whether to continue playing or not. Each question must be fully answered correctly to advance the child towards the grand prize of $500,000. The money ladder went as follows:
Questions given are at different higher education levels: “College”, “Masters”, and “Doctorate”. The $500,000 questions were said to be only answered by “some of the most finest minds” in the world.
The parents are situated directly across the child, and directly adjacent to a panel of three experts. The parents have the right to stop the game before any question to take the accumulated winnings, as well as two helps:
Preview the question themselves. Have the experts preview the question and advise the parents on its difficulty.
Cancellation
On January 7, 2010, one week before its scheduled premiere, the show's creator, Mark Burnett, announced that he had asked Fox to postpone the premiere of Our Little Genius due to concerns about its integrity. Burnett said that issues with how information was relayed to contestants were serious enough that he felt compelled to reshoot the episodes. Fox supported Burnett's decision, and added that all contestants would keep their winnings. The previously scheduled American Idol (which had been extended to 75 minutes, with the premiere of Our Little Genius airing for 45 minutes after it) was extended to 90 minutes, and a rerun of The Simpsons episode "Once Upon a Time in Springfield" filled the rest of the hour.
The Los Angeles Times reported that Burnett's main concern was that contestants somehow got more information than they should have prior to taping. An audience report to the website BuzzerBlog suggested that the show had also stopped tape to replace a category that a contestant was not confident with, with a stage manager claiming that there had been a technical error. On February 20, 2010, it was reported that the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) had recently begun an inquiry into Our Little Genius, based on complaints alleging that the contestants were being coached prior to filming on topics (such as in one case, on the British terms for four specific musical note values they "needed to know"), and that their parents were being given influence over questions.
In 2021, The Arizona Republic published accounts from one former contestant, Benjamin Mohler— who was answering questions on paleontology. Prior to filming, his father was asked by one of the producers without context to ensure that Benjamin knew about "Harry Seeley" and "1888"—the author and year of publication of the research paper which divided dinosaurs into two clades. Although his father initially suspected that these may have been relating to one of the panelists, they ended up being the answers for one of the questions in the game.