Rob Lowe is back to host another season of Fox‘s game show The Floor, featuring a few new twists and an interesting homage to the U.S. with its Season 4 theme “Battle of the States.”
The show has assembled two players per state to represent all 50 members of the Union, duking it out for bragging rights (and up to $250,000). “Everybody’s got their state pride,” Lowe told Deadline in a recent interview.
It is a stroke of irony that The Floor does not actually film in the U.S. and houses its production just outside of Dublin, Ireland, due to cost-saving measures. It’s a move many productions have made over the last decade-plus, and one Lowe himself lamented earlier this year, calling for better incentives, particularly in California, to make domestic production more feasible.
A few months after he insisted that “it’s criminal what California and L.A. have let happen,” the state legislature significantly bolstered California Film & TV Tax Credit program, not only boosting funding to $750M annually but also expanding eligibility.
“It’s way better than it was,” Lowe told Deadline of the recent changes. However, he added, “the one thing we need to do is the above-the-line cost needs to be in consideration. It currently isn’t, and that is a huge difference maker.”
Lowe isn’t alone in pushing for above-the-line costs (which include pay for writers, directors, actors and producers among others) in the qualified expenditures covered under the state’s program, and it was brought up many times in the debates surrounding this year’s revamp. The prevailing argument in favor, which Lowe also noted, is that huge studios are unlikely to ever return to California if they can’t write off those costs since they often make up a significant portion of a production’s budget.
The current program is “great for low budget, medium budget stuff, but for…big budgets, it’s going to be hard to bring them to LA until that happens,” Lowe continued.
However, at least for now, it seems to be off the table. As stakeholders involved in this year’s program changes told Deadline, they believed the above-the-line fight would be a hard sell in the legislature (and with the working class people in California who may not appreciate their tax dollars funding massive talent paydays).
As for whether the federal government will ever step in to help staunch the bleeding of the mass production exodus, Lowe adds himself to a growing list of names advocating for such a move as well.
“I would love it. Entertainment has been and always will be America’s greatest export,” he said. “So if you’re gonna do it for other exports, one would think you would do it here. So I’m hopeful that that would happen as well.”
Regardless of where it films, though, Lowe does think audiences are seriously missing out if they aren’t tuning into The Floor, which he calls “a delicious recipe of fun, smart, stupid, silly, dramatic, [and] addicting” — especially this season.
“All the new rule changes really keep [contestants] on their toes, because they were unaware of them,” he says. “They show up, they’ve trained, they’ve picked their category, they’ve gone through the vetting process, and they get there, and then in the first episode, I say, ‘Hey, by the way, this year, things are different.’ So all their great plans go out the window.”
In addition to the “Battle of the States” concept, The Floor‘s new rule changes include category steal, which allows contestants to choose between a time boost or a category swap with another contestant if they win three duels in a row, and the golden square, where one randomly selected category square will yield an immediate $10,000 for the winner of that duel.
Whether they know it or not, viewers have probably come across content from the game show online, considering it has spawned several viral trends.
“I just continue to marvel at how the show has entered the zeitgeist,” Lowe went on. “I saw just today, another huge TikTok trend Kim Kardashian was doing…you can’t manufacture it. You never know if it’s gonna happen, and when you’re a part of something that becomes that thing, you just sit back and enjoy it.”
The Floor Season 4 premiered September 24. New episodes air Wednesdays at 8 p.m. ET/PT on Fox.
The post Rob Lowe Explains How ‘The Floor’ Will Add New Twists For Season 4 & Weighs In On California’s Revamped Film/TV Tax Credit appeared first on Deadline.
