He does the Günther Jauch – with more action

Stefan Raab took his time with his comeback on Saturday evening. It took more than two hours before the entertainer slowly made his way towards the audience up a long staircase with lots of fireworks. His new show “Du gewinnst hier nicht die Million bei Stefan Raab” (DGHNDMBSR) moved faster on Wednesday evening. The show, originally scheduled for 8:10 p.m. on RTL+, was even available a little earlier – and delivered a mixture of “TV Total”, “Schlag den Raab” and “Wer wird Millionär?” in just over 90 minutes.

Raab – light blue shirt, jeans and white sneakers, basically everything as before – was celebrated frenetically when he entered his new studio, where he was greeted not only by the audience (the tickets sold out quickly after the show was announced) but also by his old companions, the band Heavytones. Is everything really as it used to be? Well, apart from the station. Because instead of his former home station ProSieben, Raab is now signed up to RTL – the station he used to love making jokes about. But Raab wouldn't be Raab if he didn't at least make a few little jabs at the RTL staff.

RTL reality stars are not spared

Reality stars Calvin Kleinen and Marco Cerullo, who Raab had “never heard of either,” believed in this. Their interviews before the boxing match on Saturday, at which they were guests like almost every other RTL face, provided enough reason. The two men, known from dating shows, speculated about the abbreviation on Raab's cap. “Never use your brain again, that's the original meaning,” joked Raab, and then referred to the two as the “Lanz and Precht of RTL.” Okay, that was a bit funny. But Raab is supposed to be funny can (even if he does not always is), is nothing new. And the solution for the abbreviation that Cerullo and Kleinen speculated about was not particularly creative either: It was the initials for the program name, which was then changed, as Raab explained at a press conference on Saturday evening.

After he had finished with Kleinen and Cerullo, “King Lustig” joked about Regina Halmich – the bad loser he is known for –, Peter Maffay (“You don’t even know where the leather jacket ends and where the skin begins”) and Jürgen Milski, who was looking for a remote diagnosis for his inflamed eye on Instagram. Raab then showed another picture of Halmich with black eyes after the fight and said: “What it looks like in the final stages if you do nothing.” Well, that was of course a perfect opportunity.

Only those who paid attention to “TV Total” can make it to WWM and “Schlag den Raab”

A few jokes and sayings about 35 minutes of “TV Total” – er, DGHNDMBSR – later, the candidates already seated there came into play. And like with Günther Jauch, only here with a buzzer instead of a screen, there was a first question which was about a fact from the official part. Only those who paid attention during the “TV Total” part can make it to the mix of “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?” and “Beat the Raab”. Whoever buzzes the fastest and answers the question correctly gets to sit on the chair on Raab. The only difference is that on Raab there are no jokers and there are 14 prize levels instead of 15. Two quiz questions each like on “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?”, then a game against Raab like on “Beat the Raab”, and so on, until at the end there are two final games and the one million euro game. But no one got that far that evening.

After a first buzzing candidate caused an unintentional comedy by answering the question “What is the name of the Toten Hosen song that was played at the Catholic service?”, which had been shown beforehand, with “Arschficksong”, Oliver from Karlsruhe then had the right answer to the following question about which country the island belonged to, to which Jürgen Mislki had to fly before his doctor's appointment. And thus made it to the chair of Raab's “first entertainment quiz competition hybrid show in the world”.

What was not shown on TV during the Stefan Raab fight

Stefan Raab got a slap in the face from Regina Halmich and then announced his TV comeback: All of this was shown on RTL on Saturday evening. But what happened before the show and during the commercial breaks can be read here.

Will Sören be the first to win the million in Raab’s new show?

He guessed the first two questions correctly, although he was “absolutely unsure”. He beat Raab, who was as ambitious as ever, by clipping through a wire mesh fence. The “years of abstinence from Raab” (commentator of the game) are starting to take their toll, at least a little. Oliver was lucky to solve the next two quiz questions, but in the next game, “Office Chair Ball”, he had to admit defeat to the “Raabinator”. He went home with 1,000 euros, which he won in the first game, and it's already clear that, like on “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?”, a million will definitely not be handed out every week.

However, Sören from Berlin was the next to get the chance to be the first to do this on DGHNDMBSR. In this show, he successfully mastered two quiz questions and a head-to-head race in changing car tires – then the show's time was up.

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95 minutes of broadcast time on RTL+ (the show is not shown on linear TV, much to the annoyance of some fans) flew by. Only when it came to changing the car tires did it get a bit tedious and tedious, otherwise Raab's new show was entertaining, mostly funny and varied – but there is little that is really innovative or new about it, unless you want to describe the combination of these three show parts as such.

And that's the problem: what Raab did at ProSieben back then was somehow all new, cheeky, and crossing boundaries. Now it's not like that anymore. It's nostalgia television, or rather streaming, for Raab fans or people who just want to be entertained for an evening. It works well. But after the artificially inflated Instagram announcements before the comeback at the boxing match on Saturday and the drawn-out show with all the frills, people were expecting something new. Instead, Raab is almost like he used to be, a refreshed remake, so to speak.

That's perfectly fine if Raab doesn't care that he's risking his “TV legend status”, which was crowned by his departure at the right time in 2015. And Raab, as we all know, doesn't care about anything.