Williston Park native Dan Dutton hasn’t quite recovered from his brief whirlwind of prime time TV celebrity after competing in the “Million Second Quiz” on NBC last month.
Like the show’s short-lived network run, Dutton’s experience was a roller coaster ride.
He racked up a tally of $80,000 in prize money but was knocked out of the competition – and the money – on the second day of the 11-day competition.
“It was all kind of a blur. It was a great learning experience. It’s something I never did before and something I’ll probably never get the chance to do again,” Dutton said. “But I’m proud that I did it.”
Dutton, 28, earned a shot at applying for an audition for the show in August, when he racked up 3,500 points playing a trivia app on his cell phone.
NBC was using the app as a promotion for the quiz show the network planned to launch in September featuring Ryan Seacrest as the host.
Dutton received an e-mail the week before the show debuted on Sept. 9, inviting him for an audition on that Monday morning.
The Herricks High School alum went to the NBC studios in Manhattan, filled out some paperwork, had an on-camera interview and was asked to wait.
Dutton said he thought that was it for the day.
But several hours later, he was thrust into live prime time on the trivia game show to compete for the “money chair,” where contestants can run up cash winnings if they hold off challengers.
“I had no expectations going in. I did not expect to have the chance to be in money chair,” Dutton said. “It was very surreal really, meeting Ryan Seacrest.”
Sitting in the money chair, he held off challenges from 11 or 12 contestants with five seconds to answer a steady stream of multiple-choice trivia questions. The length of each two-person quiz was 500 seconds, he said.
“It gets very intense. You either know the answers or you don’t,” Dutton said. “I was in the money chair for two to three hours. That’s when I accumulated the $80,000 that got me into winners row.”
Ironically, no footage of Dutton competing on the show was aired, although he was shown on air as one of the competitors.
He said his parents told him there was also some footage from his audition interview and shots of the living quarters he briefly shared in the studio before he was bumped from the competition.
Dutton triumphed the first day, initially ranking among the top three competitors before slipping into to fourth place, but still hanging in on the show’s “winner’s row.”
That was the good news.
Then Dutton was told the winner’s row contestants would be sequestered in the studio and effectively cut off from the outside world.
Before he gave up his cell phone, he managed to call his parents and let them know his car was in the Mineola parking garage near the Long Island Rail Road station. Recently laid off from a job in client services, he was game to keep going.
True to its name, the hour-long nightly quiz show contest would continue for one million seconds – approximately 11 days – until an ultimate winner would be crowned. The winner’s row contestant had access to showers in the studio and were provided with meals and beds to sleep in – but Dutton hadn’t prepared for an extended stay.
“I only had one pair of underwear and socks,” he said. “It was starting to get a little gross, not having a change of clothes.”
On Tuesday, Dutton won the “power player” spot among the four top scorers by outpointing them in a written 60-question trivia quiz before the next round aired that night. He faced a tactical choice: whether to sit in the money chair again and attempt to push his winning streak or sit tight and designate another contestant to take the prime time hot seat.
He chose to sit out and the strategy backfired when another contestant ran up $157,000 and knocked Dutton out of the money.
“I would have liked to have stayed longer and win some money. I should have gone on myself instead of sending someone else,” Dutton said.
It was the first time he’d competed on a TV trivia game show, but not his first trivia competition.
When he was a fifth grader in the Herricks School District’s Gemini program for gifted students at the Searingtown School, he said, he was a member of a four-student team that beat 15 other teams of gifted fifth graders from other Nassau County School Districts.
Disappointed as he left the studio on Wednesday morning, he quickly realized his prime-time appearance hadn’t gone unnoticed.
His parents had been alerted he was on the show Monday night by friends and his father recorded him on the show. Friends from Herricks High School had sent messages of support to his phone and on his Facebook page before his short-lived TV fame had ended.
“‘My cell phone pretty much exploded,” Dutton said.
Dutton said a combination of factors fed his initial success, including his Herricks education.
“It was a combination of school learning, current events and what I picked up from watching TV and whatnot,” Dutton said.
He said he couldn‘t bring himself to watch the finale of the show’s 11-hour run on Sept. 19, when a contestant Dutton initially beat to gain the money chair walked off with $2.6 million as the winner. He hasn’t yet watched the recording of himself either.
Like Dutton, “Million Second Quiz” was a prime time washout.
Ratings peaked at 6.5 million viewers for the show’s debut, slumping each night after that, down to four million viewers on Friday night and 2.9 million viewers on Saturday night of the first week.
The quiz show’s two-hour finale rallied with a ratings rise, but time had run out for “Million Second Quiz” to prove itself as the peacock network pulled the plug.
Dutton now also has a claim to fame as one of the show’s only contestants.
