I've watched three episodes of the NBC drama "Windfall," and I don't hate it. It's wildly implausible in many ways, but it passes the time. Still, one thing keeps bothering me about it, and it's the way it deals with the lottery money.

Let me first say that I have bought more than one lottery ticket. And when the jackpot gets big, the bride and I will discuss what we would do with the money. Our priorities are not quite those of the people on "Windfall," but we are older than those characters, and considerably more practical. But I understand the whole what-if thing behind viewers' interest in "Windfall."

Still, the show pays so fast and loose with the money won and how people are spending it, that I keep getting jarred out of my escaping into the show's soapy storylines. So let's do a little math.

The show likes to talk about each of the 20 or so winners ending up with $20 million — a jackpot that lets them spend like Paris Hilton on a shopping binge. Only they don't have that much money. The $20 million — or $19.6 million, if you take the onscreen jackpot and cut it 20 ways — probably gets halved by tax obligations. So let's say $10 million.

Then let's think about how the winners decided to get paid. The show was murky about whether each took a lump sum or an annual payment. Since some of the storylines suggest that they have all their money, let's figure they took a lump sum. It's not going to be $10 million. The cash option in big-jackpot lotteries runs around 45 to 55 percent of the total you would receive if you took annual payments. Let's call it 50 percent, and say that each winner is down to $5 million.

That's still a very nice payday, but it's not something that would have me jetting to Paris or buying a $100,000 car or writing a check for six figures worth of school supplies, the way the people on "Windfall" do. Forget that no one has stopped to calculate health-insurance costs once they quit their jobs, or what it's going to cost to maintain those new houses some are buying. They're spending as if they have LeBron money. LeBron makes a reported $4 million-plus every year just from his Cavs salary; he piles endorsement money on top of that.

Just to be even clearer — and since I am in total math-geek mode — let's consider annual payments. That puts us back to that $10 million after taxes, but the payments are spread over 26 years. That averages a little under $385,000 a year. I would welcome that salary, especially since I would be in my eighties before the payments stopped. But I'd have to be a lot more careful than anyone on "Windfall" is. No Vipers on my shopping list.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 27th, 2006 at 9:34 am and is filed under Television. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.