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I've been tracking the trial run of 25 Words or Less in the faux tweets. While the ratings weren't spectacular, they did improve as the three-week trial went on.  It looks like the Password knockoff might have a chance for a nationwide rollout in the fall of 2019. Frank Cicha, Fox's programming chief, says the trial went well enough that the show has a "real possibility" of a full-scale run in 2019. "The show is well done. Bringing in Meredith [Vieira] was a big get. It makes it more fun. It makes it recognizable. It makes it feel a little bigger." A little bigger is better than a little smaller, right? Cicha thinks the show could be an okay lead-in or lead-out for Family Feud on Fox stations and elsewhere. ( 25 Words or Less aired at 6:30 PM on WWOR in New York City during its trial run, leading out of Feud .) In my home DFW market the show aired in the middle of the afternoon, a not particularly favorable time slot. With some possible openings in t

As readers of this blog probably know, I'm a baseball fan. And as most baseball fans certainly know, there are perpetual controversies over the Hall of Fame. Who should be in, who shouldn't be in, who should do the voting, etc. Mention the words "Shoeless Joe Jackson" to a bunch of fans, and you'll immediately start an HoF argument. I had no idea that's there's something called the Television Academy Hall of Fame. But it does exist, and a recent article suggested some more inductees. Among the suggestions was Alex Trebek. My first thought was, how did Alex avoid induction into the TV Hall of Fame? The guy's been around forever on television and he's a household name in just about every household, especially the Nielsen ones. Then I reviewed the list of current inductees, and I noticed that only two people mostly known for game shows are in there. Sure, there are other inductees with plenty of experience in the genre, like Betty White and Regis P

A few posts ago I was whining for a Legends of the Hidden Temple reboot. If we can't have a reboot, there's always the original. Streaming service VRV has added Legends and a bunch of other Nick oldies in a channel called - wait for it - Nick Splat. The channel costs $5.99 a month as a stand-alone, or you can buy it as part of the service's premium bundle at $9.95 a month. The linked article zeroes in on the target demo... With NickSplat, it's now going after a slightly different demographic – kids who grew up watching Nickelodeon on linear TV and are nostalgic for those old shows. Maybe they even want to stream them for their own kids these days. A lot of those nostalgic folks write for pop culture web sites, where they pine endlessly for the Nick shows of olden times. Hey, I'm part of that demo myself, at least when it comes to Legends . By the way, I like that phrase "linear TV." I think it's a polite way of saying "old-fashioned TV in the br

Another slow summer week saw a new season low for Jeopardy and not much cheer for other syndie game shows. At least most of them were flat. TV News Check has the lackluster household ratings for the week of August 13-19... Family Feud 6.1 - down a tick but still on top of the genre Wheel of Fortune 5.3 - flat Jeopardy 5.2 - down a couple ticks to that season low Millionaire 1.6 - flat Funny You Should Ask 0.5 - flat for the perennial cellar dweller I doubt that Steve Harvey will be too concerned about the tenth of a point. Celebrity Family Feud is still drawing over six million viewers and is heading for a sixth season next summer. A cable note: the latest run of America Says drew 440K viewers compared to 370K viewers for the latest run of Cash Cab . Trouble is, Discovery gets much better numbers overall than GSN. Not a good sign for Ben and friends. Meanwhile, GSN got 415K/272K viewers prime time/total day for the week of August 20-26. The network ranked 34th and 29th in

Family Feud is coming to Louisville for contestant auditions. They want to know the most popular item to put between two buns. Or at least that's what the Louisville Courier-Journal says. (By the way, the newspaper's web site has that USA Today clone look.) "Lots of energy and enthusiasm and the ability to play the game" are wanted qualities in contestants, which should not come as a surprise. That's what all the casting calls say, along with BIG personalities. Feud is also interested in "weird abilities," like yodeling or eyelid tricks. I don't have either of those attributes, but they must come in handy at game show auditions. You should also be 15 years of age or older. The mature nature of some of the questions, you know. If you don't know about that mature nature, check the nearest game show oldies board and you'll find out.

John McCain, longtime senator from Arizona and a presidential candidate in 2008, has died at age 81. Sometimes I feel a little ghoulish doing it, but whenever a well-known person dies, I generally check IMDb to see if there are any game show connections. I really wasn't expecting anything for John McCain, but I did find one credit for Millionaire . Back in 2010 on the syndie version, he presented a few questions on the show. YouTube has one of them. I try to keep this blog as nonpolitical as possible, so I'll leave the political comments on the senator to other sites. But I did have a couple of odd thoughts when I went through this Internet search. One, it seemed a little strange that a politician would have such a long IMDb page. But I guess politicos do a lot of acting of one kind or another. Second, does anybody with any kind of celebrity turn up on a game show sooner or later? Our little genre has seen a zillion famous faces over the years.

Another weekend brings another nostalgic list of Nick shows from the 1990s. The latest collection of ten golden oldies includes two game shows, and you can probably guess them. Double Dare at #10 and Legends of the Hidden Temple at #7. One of these shows has gotten a full-scale reboot. One of them hasn't, and it's the better show (in my opinion). In fact, I think Legends is the best kid game show ever on any network. The Double Dare rewind did decent business for Nick, even if the ratings trailed off some from the initial numbers. I don't know why Legends wouldn't perform at least passably for its network. Kirk Fogg would probably have to be around, even if he was paired with a co-host, as they did with Marc Summers on Double Dare . But they would have no problem finding kid contestants to face the wrath of the temple guards and the puzzle of the silver monkey. Maybe they could even get a live touring show out of the reboot, just like Double Dare . Take Olmec aroun

Game show contestant stories are a dime a dozen. But this one is a little more interesting than most. Maybe it's because the contestant has some interesting things to say, beyond how everything is surreal and the host is so nice. The player in question is named David Walters, and he competed on America Says with other members of his dodgeball league. He recounts how his team made it through the audition process, then comments on the helter-skelter of the actual game... All of a sudden you've got people putting mics on you, you've got people touching up your makeup, you've got him [host John Michael Higgins] talking to you trying to get some background information, you've got people coming through to remind you of the rules, there are 12 different things all going on, and they're trying to get the show started. It's a lot of sensory overload as soon as you step on stage. That's something to remember every time you're tempted to make fun of game show

Once in a while the oldies boards indulge in dream schedules for GSN. For the most part the results are exactly what you would expect. The posters want to turn GSN into Buzzr, plus some non-Fremantle shows and minus Celebrity Name Game or anything else "past 2004," like this guy. Well, we've already got Buzzr and it plays to an audience of several dozen hardcores (slight exaggeration). Sometimes a more offbeat suggestion surfaces. This poster wants to bring back a lot of GSN originals on weekends. It's a mixed bag, everything from the lame quizzer Wintuition to the overdone Soska concoction Hellevator . In the middle of it all, there's an hour of That's the Question . I've blogged before about this interesting word game, which was too quiet and cerebral for its own good. The show was still fun to play along with, much like the similarly brain-teasing Now You See It . I doubt that reruns of That's the Question will ever see the light of GSN, though

Jeopardy is goosing the next season with a twitter tease. The new season premieres September 10, and something BIG is coming! Stay tuned. The resulting (and predictable) speculation runs the gamut you might expect. More money, more Alex facial hair, a new host, different stunts, etc. Combined with Alex's own tease about retirement, the show has ginned up some buzz for the new season. Which isn't easy for an aged quizzer to do. Jeopardy's been around so long, it's starting to make me look sort of young (major exaggeration). It's hard to imagine the show will start ladling out more cash. In the fractured media world of a zillion channels into almost every household, Jeopardy has seen an inevitable ratings decline. So I doubt that losing contestants will suddenly start keeping all the cash they pile up. And a new host announcement would seem strange at this point, since Alex has promised to hang around at least through the 2019-20 season. It's probably just so

Kind of a droopy week for syndie game shows in the droopy days of August. A few shows moved a tenth of a point, and that was it. TV News Check has the blah household ratings for the week of August 6-12... Family Feud 6.2 - down a tick, at least it moved Jeopardy 5.4 - flat Wheel of Fortune 5.3 - down a tick Millionaire 1.6 - up a tick to pretty much its season-long average Funny You Should Ask 0.5 - flat Cash Cab has settled into high 400K viewer numbers. That would be just fine for GSN but it's not so hot for Discovery. We'll see if the show gets any more eps. Speaking of GSN, the network got 412K/276K viewers prime time/total day for the week of August 13-19. GSN ranked 35th and 28th in the windows. Pretty typical but down a tad from a strong July.

A faux tweet noted that a Double Dare live show is coming to Chicagoland. Turns out the live show is mounting a multi-city tour in October and November. So far there are 14 dates confirmed, all in the eastern half of the country. By the way, the linked story says that Nick's current Double Dare reboot ranks in the top three TV shows in kids 6-11. So there's probably a sizeable young'un audience built in for the live tour. Of course, The Price is Right has long been sending a live show hither and yon. (I've never been to hither and yon, but I hear they're nice.) Other attempts to mount live touring versions of game shows have been less successful. They've tried with Family Feud and Let's Make a Deal , without much luck. As long as Marc Summers is around, the live Double Dare show should sell some tickets. They just have to make sure there's enough green slime on hand.

I've learned from harsh experience that no entries get less notice than those about HQ and other mobile app game shows. But what the hey, I've got nothing else to write about on a slow news weekend. HQ is going to television. HQ Trivia launched an app for the Apple TV on Tuesday, allowing users to watch the show, and choose their answer to questions using the Apple TV remote. I don't own an Apple TV, but this means that HQ is getting closer to a traditional TV game show, except the audience can literally play along. The linked story points out that Disney has already tried such a crossover with its Disney Quizney effort. Maybe somebody will eventually figure out how to make an interactive game show work on plain old TV remotes, with no special gadgetry required. The story also notes that HQ has spawned a "bevy of competitors." That's a whopping understatement.

Once upon a time I worked for free on Jimbo Wales' farm, a.k.a. Wikipedia. In fact, I piled up more than eleven thousand edits and even a featured article on the site. Then I finally got tired of the middle-school cliquishness and paranoia that plagues the project. Besides, I figured it would be more fun to write my own blog. But once in a while I scratch the Wiki itch and chip in a few anonymous edits to Jimbo's big pile of stuff. Yesterday I added a couple of favorable sentences to the America Says article to balance the sour appraisal by critic Bradley Clarke. (He's the guy I mentioned in my previous blog post.) To give the devil (or Jimbo) his due, Wikipedia does have a bunch of pretty decent articles on game shows. In this blog's sidebar, there's a link to the long list of Wikipedia's game show entries. I also use the separate Wikia site on U.S. game shows, which offers more tidbits on almost any show you could want to research.

A guy named Bradley Clarke puts some cute articles about game shows on the Interwebs now and then. He's got a new list of celebs who hosted game shows, even if you don't recall their gigs in the genre. As a grizzled old game show blogger, I do remember all these hosts. Though I'll admit that I've spent way too many hours watching game shows which didn't deserve way too many hours. One of Clarke's picks is Carrie Ann Inaba, who hosted GSN's reboot of 1 vs. 100 in 2010. This was a show that I thought did deserve a bigger audience, but my view was not the received opinion. GSN had to cheapen the prize money and production values - this is cable, folks - and that left the reboot open to easy criticism. Carrie was also not the best host, as she tended to rely on irritating catch phrases. Sure enough, Bradley Clarke plods through some of these complaints in his acidic view of GSN's version. Overall, the rewind was hardly terrible, even if it suffered in com

A bit of news about Buzzr, the game show oldies diginet, has surfaced on a "video industry" site. I'm not sure exactly how much the video industry includes, but this post on the site mentions Buzzr prominently. Apparently, the site ran a previous story (hidden behind a members-only wall) that Twitch's "always on" channels aren't working very well. Buzzr's channel on Twitch is an example, albeit a little watched one. The screenshot shows a typically tiny audience of 98 viewers taking in Blockbusters on the Buzzr Twitch outlet. The linked post quotes Mark Deetjen, general manager of Buzzr, on what the diginet is trying to do with its Twitch channel. We are using [our 24/7 Twitch channel] as a lab in the sense that we can try different things. We can see how people react, see how people interact with the content, and really look at what are the consumption patterns of the Twitch viewer, which, quite frankly, is different from the OTT Viewer. It's

Four out of the five syndie game shows were flat for the latest week. The other show dropped a couple tenths. Guess which one. Okay, I'll tell you, as TV News Check posts the ho-hum household ratings for July 30-August 5... Family Feud 6.3 - flat Wheel of Fortune 5.4 - flat Jeopardy 5.4 - down a couple ticks, it was the one Millionaire 1.5 - flat Funny You Should Ask 0.5 - for one more time, flat More of the same solid numbers for GSN. 439K/288K viewers prime time/total day for the week of August 6-12. The network ranked 32nd and 28th in the windows. As the previous entry noted, GSN has renewed America Says for a jumbo-sized season of 95 eps. In the press release GSN said that the show built on its lead-in by 26% and bettered its YTD timeslot demo in women 25-54 by more than 40%. From the ratings on Show Buzz Daily , I can believe all this sweet talk. For instance, on Monday August 13 America Says drew 379K viewers and a 0.05 18-49 rating. This is good business for our

After a bunch of leaks and hints, GSN has finally made it official. America Says will return for a second season. John Michael Higgins is back as the host, and he's enthused. At least he has some enthusiastic quotes for the press release. I can't wait to challenge a whole new season of contestants with fill-in-the-blank questions that I personally guess wrong every single time. Really, you never get any questions right? Come on, you're being too modest. GSN cites encouraging ratings news, which was obvious to anybody who followed the numbers on Show Buzz Daily . The additional run every weekday at 5:30 PM was also a very big hint that the show was performing well. Maybe the biggest news is the size of the second season. 95 episodes. This probably sets a record for any renewal season of any GSN original. I have to think that the network is mulling some prime time exposure for the show if they're making this big of a commitment. No debut date for the new episodes yet.

On a not very big news day for game shows, a flub on 100K Pyramid is getting some notice. A poor civvie named Evan Kaufman briefly confused "Obama" with "Osama," a mistake that even professional news anchors have made. Much chortling ensued. I'm usually reluctant to make merry over such slips, because I don't even want to think how much I might screw up on a nationally televised game show. Game Show Garbage has a category for stupid answers, which seems logical for the site. And the Interwebs in general have a good time with bloopers and blunders in our little genre. Such goofs tend to live forever on YouTube, so we can all feel superior to those silly contestants. The good news is that the 100K Pyramid guy left with $8,500. Maybe not the biggest haul, but a decent consolation prize for the mistake.

Hadn't stopped by Game Show Paradise for a while, and I noticed a new thread called "Guilty Pleasures." When it comes to TV - as opposed to other activities - my guiltiest pleasure is probably true crime. I spend more hours than I want to admit on Investigation Discovery and Oxygen. Snapped may be my lowest-rent fave. I remember a funny tweet of a girl saying: "You're one lie away from being my co-star on an episode of Snapped ." That threat would keep me on the straight and narrow. But back to the GSP thread. The original poster defines "guilty pleasure" as "game shows that you like, but most other fans of the genre do not." Well, this is a tricky definition. The Nielsen Company is probably the best source for what most fans of any genre really like. By that definition Steve Harvey's Family Feud - though a very surprising choice for a couple of GSP posters - is not a guilty pleasure at all. His Feud is the top-rated syndie game s

Making my usual weekend rounds of the game show Interwebs, I ran across a little of my own stuff. Game Show Live quotes a post I left on GSN's Facebook page. This page is usually a haven for complainers, largely of the older-is-better persuasion. They don't much care for anything after 1990, and they really despise the Antichrist himself, Steve Harvey. So I couldn't resist a mild bit of trolling, as Game Show Live excerpts... According to the GSN online schedule, America Says gets another rerun slot at 5:30 PM starting August 6. The show has performed well, so it's no surprise that it now gets three runs (one new, two rerun) each weekday. And the legion of Harvey-haters on this site can rejoice. The despised Steve has now lost three half-hour slots on weekdays. Why, that should make your (week)day. Sad to say, another poster on the GSN Facebook page apparently didn't get the message... Can y'all quit showing Family Feud all day every day? I love the show, but

Sometimes Google News just goes bonkers with a game show item. And it's hard for me to understand exactly why. Case in point: this story about sixty eps of Jeopardy turning up on Hulu. Okay, I get that OTT streaming is the Big New Thing, endlessly ballyhooed as the death of regular TV and the dawn of a new era. But a mere sixty episodes of the venerable quizzer set off a bunch of stories on the Interwebs? I can lean back in my lounger and watch a double run of Jeopardy every weeknight. So what's the big deal? They apparently did pick some of the more notable eps from the show's enormous archives, but a lot of memorable Jeopardy moments are already available on YouTube. I suppose that anything about Hulu gets a lot of news play nowadays, but sixty reruns hardly seem to be worth all the fuss.

CBS's daytime lineup has won the ratings wars for 437 years now (slight exaggeration) and most of the lineup will kick off the new fall season on September 17. The Price is Right begins its 47th season and Let's Make a Deal begins its 10th in their current incarnations. Of course, both shows date back much further into the thick mists of game show antiquity. The Fremantle war horses have been around so long that it's a little hard to imagine the game show world without them. Still, LMAD vanished for almost twenty years after 1990, except for a very brief prime time try on NBC. I can remember the hubbub when CBS revived the show in 2009 with Wayne Brady - that Whose Line guy? - at the helm. By no means did everybody believe that Wayne's version would survive. Well, here we are, ten seasons later. My indifference to shopping games is well known, so I can't say that I'm a huge fan of the CBS duo. But even my grumpy self enjoys the occasional clips on YouTube. G

As I've mentioned a few times, game shows have been knocking each other off as long as there have been game shows. America Says has successfully (in my opinion, and the Nielsen Company seems to agree) knocked off Family Feud . Now comes 25 Words or Less , which like several other shows, knocks off the lightning round from Password . Now that I think about it, how many word-game shows has Password spawned in one way or the other? Quite a few, no? Some Fox O&O's are trial-running 25 Words or Less , and I finally caught an ep on my local DFW affiliate. Two teams of three (two sort of celebs and a civvie) compete, and the kicker is that the cluegiver only has a limited number of words to nail five answers in forty-five seconds. 25 words or less, get it? In the first two rounds of the front game, the teams bid against each other for how few words they can use. In the third round things get complicated when the civvies select the answers to be guessed, and...oh, what the hey, I

As readers of this blog know, I rely on Show Buzz Daily - I spell it with three words because it looks less trendy that way - for lots of ratings information. In fact, the site is the best source for individual cable show numbers on the Internet. Every day they publish a top-150 list of first-run cable programs, along with the broadcast network numbers. (The broadcast ratings are widely available on other sites.) Show Buzz Daily lists the cable shows by 18-49 ratings. Which is vaguely irritating and ageist, but I can understand why the site does it. The party line is that advertisers only look at 18-49 numbers. I don't really buy this story. The entire country has aged a lot over the past few decades. In 1970 the median age of the U.S. population was 28.1 years. Now it's 38.0 years. Lots of cable networks that appeal to older viewers - not coincidentally including GSN - seem to do very good business, thank you. Somebody is spending ad bucks on viewers who fall outside the S

While I wait for the syndie game show ratings, Show Buzz Daily provides an interesting bit of info on GSN's two recent originals. The site's latest top-150 chart for Friday, August 3 lists America Says with a typically good 397K viewers and a 0.06 18-49 rating. Caroline & Friends trails behind at 279K and 0.05. As I blogged before, it looks like John Michael Higgins and his friends have already won a renewal. The jury is still out on Caroline Rhea and her buddies. Often, Caroline & Friends lands outside the top-150 chart on Show Buzz Daily . The site bases the chart on the 18-49 demo and it's not friendly to the ancient skewing GSN. So I don't have a lot of numbers on the show. Overall, Caroline & Friends doesn't seem to be bombing horribly, but it's not a solid hit like America Says , either. Stay tuned as the show's fate unfolds. TV News Check has now posted the syndie game show ratings for July 23-29. Not much movement except for a coup

A faux tweet quietly noted that Chris Hardwick has survived the #MeToo attack. He'll be back on The Wall and his other hosting gigs on NBC and AMC. For the most part there hasn't been much reaction to the story. I suspect that a lot of people think the whole mess was just a bad break-up instead of any real wrongdoing. Even granting Hardwick's accuser every benefit of the doubt, her own complaints make her sound like more like a jilted lover than a victim of genuine abuse. A dissenting view comes from - not surprisingly, considering the site's politics - GQ . (I always have to smile a little when a fashion rag like Gentleman's Quarterly has any politics, but they definitely do.) The writer takes every word of Hardwick's accuser as absolute truth - a risky proposition to begin with - and summarily dismisses any evidence to the contrary. He also has the annoying habit of tossing around the s-word and the f-word to prove what a tough-minded person he is. In the e

First, I'll confess that I'm not much of a Mila Kunis fan. In fact, most of the time I only see her on Jim Beam ads during baseball games (see screenshot). But I did run across a funny note about the liquor-peddling Mila on my usual Google News search for game show items. Apparently, there's an urban legend about the actress that she learned English from watching a game show. She denies the legend but admits some responsibility for it... I made a statement when I was 14 that is going to haunt me the rest of my life about how I used to watch The Price Is Right when I was learning English. It just happened to be on TV before I went to school. It wasn't something I was consciously aware of. Hm, a lot to unpack here. How could anybody not be consciously aware of The Price is Right when it's on TV? The show is loud enough to wake the dead, whether or not they speak English. And wouldn't TPiR leave an English learner with a rather specialized vocabulary? You would le

Rummaging around the game show Internet boards, I came across this thread about Family Feud on Reddit. To some extent it's just the usual Steve Harvey bashing. You've seen it all before on the game show Interwebs, especially the older-is-better precincts. But one poster, who must be aiming for the Nobel Prize in Steve Hate, really goes bonkers. Or maybe he's just more honest than other posters. Harvey is a sexist, bigoted, kinda f----d [editorial deletion] up sort of guy. Course we know that Combs had his problems in his personal life, but he wasn't a bad person. Harvey kinda is. But the people who watch Family Feud don't really know that side of him. So production tries to hide it with the sexual references and his holier than thou approach. But the real problem is, since is he such a bigoted and hateful person, Harvey can't connect with the families like Combs and Dawson could. Is this guy trying to get canonized on the oldies boards? Even on the Interwebs th

This entry is a bit of inside baseball, to clear up a few internal matters on the blog. One of the biggest changes I had to make on the blog was my reluctant decision to put comments on moderation. It's too bad, but trolls from alt.tv.game-shows were bombarding the blog with nonsensical comments. It just got to be too much of a pain to monitor and delete them all. Luckily, moderation seems to have worked well so far. The quality and quantity of the comments have risen, and more than a few interesting threads have resulted. One obvious caveat. Though I hardly ever delete comments any more - almost all the comments I zap are clearly spam - I do reserve the right to reply to criticism. If you rip me a new one in a comment, don't be amazed when I rip back. I'll follow my own guidelines and won't get obscene or libelous, but I will respond forcefully. Just sayin', so you know. Let's see, what else...oh, GSN seems to have stopped sending me the pdf schedules. Last on

As the Fox-Disney merger or sale or mess lurches forward, the remaining Fox broadcast network looks to get cheaper and younger. Oops, that's sports talk. But it's also game show talk. Because game shows are notoriously cheap to produce, and Fox will debut three of them in the 2018-19 season. The weirdest one sounds like the mystery guest segment on What's My Line , only the mystery guests are the ones who are blindfolded, not the panel. And the guests sing instead of talking in strange accents. The show's title is The Masked Singer , and it features Grammy winners and other celeb warblers doing karaoke for a panel of Ken Jeong, Jenny McCarthy, Nicole Scherzinger and Robin Thicke. The celebs wear elaborate costumes including silly masks, and the panel tries to guess who they are. It's based on what we're assured is a "hugely popular" Korean format, and Nick Cannon hosts. However popular it may prove to be, The Masked Singer debuts next January. Then th

I've bashed Game Show Garbage over the years for excessive negativity. Given the site's title, they have to be negative, but sometimes (or close to all the time) they go overboard on the grumpiness. The site just posted one of the weirder gripes I've ever seen, though. Wheel [of Fortune] currently has some of the worst play happen during Armed Forces Week. Huh? I never noticed that the gameplay during Armed Forces Weeks is particularly better or worse than during Plain Old Civvies (in both senses) Weeks. Sure, there are a few bloopers from Armed Forces Weeks endlessly rehashed on YouTube. ( Game Show Garbage does some of the rehashing itself.) But there are a zillion civvie bloopers from WoF, too. Anyway, YouTube happens to offer a couple of Chuck Woolery eps from a 1978 Armed Forces Week. Readers can judge whether the gameplay is lame or not. The contestants perform just fine in my opinion, but I don't run a site that insists on game show garbage . Too bad the vi