[Technically on vacation this week, but I had this fragment ready to go. Some part of this will end up in the book, but it's really more space than is required for the subject.]
I happened across a moment during the two minute drill of The Chase. Around question 24 or 25 of the team's stack, the teams question was a brief two words. Spell "Rhythm." And it did exactly what it was intended to do: run the last six seconds of the clock off, and not require another question to be pulled from offstage.
I had this reaction to the presence of the spelling question, and not just because saying coelacanth in that drawl was once an inside joke among Pitt Quiz Bowl:
The book is going to invest some time on questions that force exceptions to the television show's ruleset. More frequent examples of this include audio questions, computation questions, visual questions, and multiple choice questions. These may or may not appear in a particular show, but they create situation that have to be explained to teams in advance. Because spelling questions require a longer time to answer than regular questions, and there need to be rules in place about what constitutes a paused answer, if your team will face spelling questions you will be given ample warning of their existence.
Spelling questions used to be commonplace, but they're now the rarest of the special cases, College Bowl competition used to have an easily detectable form of question that started with the word to be spelled and then its definition, but that form died out in circuit competition in the 1990s. In fact, I was surprised to see it appear at all anywhere. Coelacanth...
One reason that spelling is rare is that it requires such extra rules, but another is that it requires the moderator to be perfect every time in giving the correct spelling after an incorrect answer. Spelling also requires extra levels of judgment, and recording fidelity so that the answer is clear to the judges, the host, and the television audience. Now that the ability to rewind and replay are de facto standard for television devices, any mistake that makes it through to broadcast will be caught by the audience. This is a greater problem with spelling question, because the entirety of the question's clues are the answer being reviewed. The question can't be misread, out of date, or a typo.
The other reason spelling questions aren't used widely is that they are designed to a different tempo than other questions. Most spelling bees give a minimum of 30 seconds to spell the word. This is a much longer time than other questions in any televised format. Essentially, when it includes spelling, television quiz bowl requires performance equal to or better than national championships.
Spelling questions do something very effectively in a television format. They eat up time in a remarkably foolproof way. The television appeal of a spelling question is the tension as the task is completed. The question is by nature shorter than the average question, so it can't be that the reader is wasting the time of the team when asking the question. It forces the player or team into think time immediately, and the time is lost on their side of the exchange. In the high school shows I watched for this, spelling was very rare, not guaranteed to appear in the packet, and when it did it was the last question in a timed section. This seems intentional.
You cannot high point the question when you have a spelling question. Unless you have a question like the old College Bowl format, there's no point of anticipation in the question.
Do you need a speller on your team, to account for the presence of spelling questions? Not really. If you're bringing a competitive speller on your quiz bowl team, their primary skill in that field is not directly applicable. Where they have value, sometimes tremendous value, is in the secondary skills of the spelling bee: onstage poise, lack of stage fright, experience in memorization, and their experience with word origins and vocabulary. Most shows lean on that vocabulary aspect to ask questions in the arts and especially the sciences, and do so with such frequency that a serious competitive speller will be able to answer questions that exceed what they have learned in their school curriculum.
If you don't have a speller, you need to let your team know to get rid of the question as soon as they realize nobody can do the task. You can't guess your way into a correct answer with spelling, and the process of a wild guess will take much longer than simply passing. I would love to find footage of a spelling question where the team realizes there's no chance on the question and they respond to the directive “Spell coelacanth.” : "No." or "N-O."