'Treasure' fails to fully shine

The potential of 'Treasure Hunters' is subverted by poor editing and cheesy lines.
By DAVID BIANCULLI
NEW YORK DAILY NEWS
The twin inspirations for NBC's new "Treasure Hunters" reality competition series are as obvious as they are derivative: equal parts "The Amazing Race" and "The Da Vinci Code."
The resultant series, which premieres at 8 p.m. today, could be a lot better -- but also a lot worse.
What the show (which settles into a 9 p.m. Monday slot after its expanded two-hour launch) has going for it is that real-estate mantra: "location, location, location."
The first "Treasure Hunters" starts in Hawaii and Alaska, then heads to the contiguous 48 states and winds up headed for Mt. Rushmore.
Visually, it's a treat, as contestants rappel on glaciers, jump off ships into the ocean, and hike, climb and dive in search of clues.
One drawback of "Treasure Hunters," though, is the same thing that slows down the movie version of "The Da Vinci Code." Watching people go through the cerebral process of decoding clues isn't always as dynamic, or as clear, as it might be on the page.
The structure
"Treasure Hunters" gathers five three-member teams (with names such as "Ex-CIA" and "Geniuses") and sets them off to find and solve various puzzles. The stragglers will be ousted, and host Laird Macintosh adopts the same language as on "Amazing Race" to threaten -- promise -- that "one team will be eliminated."
The show's clever initial twist is that the players are unaware that a second group of five teams has begun the game from a different location. Not until they run into each other, almost literally, do they comprehend that the game is twice as difficult to win as they had thought.
It's also, as a TV show, only about half as good as it could have been, at least at the start. There's not enough context to the settings or clarity of the assigned tasks (two things at which "The Amazing Race" excels), and the casting, so key in these shows, isn't that inspired. Team Wild Hanlons are fun because they're so clueless (in more than one sense of the word), and the Miss USA team manages to miss most clues as well.
Cheese and more cheese
But when some team members require assistance from show employees to swim to shore, or use a cell phone to call another team to discover where they went wrong, "Treasure Hunters" doesn't even seem to be playing fair. The product placement, for Motorola phones, Visa cards and ask.com, is laughably obvious, and it's clear the players have been coached: When a phone rings, one player announces, "I got a Motorola message!"
Maybe that's why the first team is eliminated via a phone message, but that seems both cowardly and stupid.
For the executive producers of this series -- and there are seven of them -- my Motorola message is this: Tighten the editing, sharpen the clues, and this may be a "Treasure" worth saving. Otherwise, it could end up being the most lethargy-inducing NBC prime-time contest since "Celebrity Cooking Showdown."