Luke Perry returns to television with this show about twenty friends (well, a group of twenty people who are mostly friends, I’ll get to that in a minute) who win the lottery. A really big lottery. $386 million, to be exact. Split that number 20 ways and you get $19.3 million each.
They do touch on the fact that each person needs to decide if they want a lump sum or over time, but they don’t actually mention what anyone decides to do. Which is interesting, since if you decide to take a lump sum payout, you’re probably going to get around 50% of the cash value. Based on a share of $19.3 million, that puts you down to $9.65 million, and you haven’t even paid taxes yet. If you want the full $19.3 million, you’ll likely have to wait 20-25 years to collect it all, somewhere around $850 thousand per year.
In any case, it’s a lot more money than any of these people have had, with jobs varying from pizza deliverer who happened to drop a dollar in to student, who met up with the folks buying the tickets as he stole a bottle of booze while the cashier wasn’t looking. Incidentally, since he was a minor, he also couldn’t collect, so he took off with his dad’s buddy’s mail-order Russian bride, married her and paid her ten grand so he could become an emancipated minor, at which point he could collect. I’m guessing he will take the lump sum, but I also suspect we’ll never know for sure.
Then there’s the guy who is on the lam and doesn’t want anyone to know he just won the lottery, so he uses his flower delivery service to steal a girl from a guy who’s a jerk, and he tells her he wants her to collect, and he’ll split the money with her, no questions asked. What he means is that he doesn’t want her to ask any questions about him. Despite being a rather uptight lawyer, she of course agrees.
Oh, and the people who buy tickets are married, but not to each other. Yet they seem to have a problem. They used to be an item, and the man wants to rekindle that action. And the woman played the man’s birthday, which just happens to be the numbers that won the whole thing - all five numbers. Since when did five numbers win a nine-digit lottery jackpot? Perhaps a bit of a stretch, but there could be a bit of fun with the whole premise.
