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HQ co-founder dies at age 35

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Colin Kroll, co-founder of live game show app HQ , has died of an apparent drug overdose. He was 35. Mr. Kroll's girlfriend called police late last night because he wasn't answering phone calls at his Manhattan apartment. Officers found him unconscious in his bedroom with drug paraphernalia. Attempts to revive him failed, and his death is tentatively ascribed to an overdose of cocaine and heroin. Mr. Kroll had faced career issues before he hit it big with HQ . There were reports about his aggressive and possibly harassing executive style, though no formal complaints were ever filed. Twitter fired him before he founded HQ with Rus Yusopov. At its peak of popularity the live game show app attracted more than two million players and spawned a host of imitators. The show has since declined in popularity, though it still draws a sizeable audience. Rus Yusopov remembered Mr. Kroll in a tweet earlier today. "I will forever remember [Colin] for his kind soul and big heart. He ma
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Pilot error

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Anybody who reads this blog knows that I'm a hopeless fan of the 1973-82 Match Game . There have been a lot of revival efforts over the decades, up to the current ABC version. Alec Baldwin's show certainly has its detractors. Try this entry on the Buzzr Facebook page for wild-eyed rage. But ABC's effort has endured through a respectable run in prime time. One try at a reboot that I didn't know much about was the unsold 1996 pilot called MG2 . Wink Martindale has relieved my ignorance by posting the pilot on YouTube. (Warning: video quality is poor, as you can see from the screenshot.) This pilot messed around with the format a lot, which I don't mind. After all, the 1973-82 version successfully messed with the stiff-as-a-board original from the 1960s. But the panel and host were forgettable, to say the least, or obnoxious, to say the worst. Charlene Tilton was really bad at the helm. Game Show Pilot Light grumps that she was "someone who has no hosting expe
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Vanna meets Marconi's box

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I've ripped on the oldies boards a lot, and they've ripped on me. But once in a while an oldies board comes up with an appealing bit of game show history. Like the Wheel of Fortune radio show. Around the turn of the millennium, WoF showrunners decided to put Vanna on the radio with a two-minute version of the ubiquitous TV show. Game Show Forum noticed that eBay was selling some of the radio shows on CD. A poster on the thread gave links to a 1998 Billboard story about the radio version here and here. The funniest comment in the story is a warning that radio Wheel of Fortune wouldn't work with every station format... I wouldn't put it on a hard rock station. It would be like, "Here's Megadeath and here's...Vanna White?" That would be an unusual combination. The Billboard story says that more than 150 country, adult contemporary, news/talk and oldies stations were carrying the show. It replaced a radio version of Jeopardy that apparently didn&#
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Get ready to match the stars again

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ABC's Match Game will return with another season January 9. The linked story cattily notes that the new go-round of the ancient format will be "returning Alec Baldwin to prime time on ABC after his eponymous talk show crashed in the fall." No, "eponymous" is not a synonym for "lousy." Though in the case of Alec's talk show, the latter adjective would be well deserved. It looks like Baldwin's latest brush with the law - a punch-up with another motorist over a parking spot - will not affect his hosting duties. He's done well on Match Game , and by and large the reboot has hewed closely to the timeless format. ABC's rewind has certainly been watchable. It may be the best effort yet to revive the legendary 1973-82 version. Unlike ABC's Sunday slate of game shows, which easily won their night in the ratings wars during the summer, Match Game didn't win much of anything during the warm weather months. For its ten eps from June thro
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Buzzr gets noticed

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It's nice when Buzzr, our little oldies diginet, gets some attention outside the narrow confines of the game show Interwebs. I had never heard of the 2 Paragraphs site, but I assume they limit their stories to two paragraphs (duh). Sure enough, that's the length of their rewrite of a press release from Buzzr about the diginet's Betty White Christmas. I got the same release in my inbox, and the linked story gives me an excuse to rewrite it myself. Come to think of it, the 2 Paragraphs site probably imposes a word limit as well. Otherwise they could dawdle along for two 10,000-word paragraphs, which would pretty much defeat the purpose. Anyway, the site counts 8 days and 71 episodes of Betty in such Buzzr staples as Match Game , Tattletales , Password Plus and Super Password . I don't know if there are any "fresh" episodes of these shows in the stunt, as the oldies boards like to call them. (For the uninitiated, "fresh" means eps that haven't t
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Ratings: syndies rebound from turkey overload

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As always, Thanksgiving week was soft for syndie game shows. So there was a big bounce back in the week of November 26-December 2. I should say the top three bounced back. There wasn't much happening for the bottom two. TV News Check has the household ratings... Jeopardy 6.4 - up nine ticks from turkey week and into first place Family Feud 6.3 - also up nine ticks for a second-place tie Wheel of Fortune 6.3 - another nine tick rise, it's the thing this week Millionaire 1.7 - flat Funny You Should Ask 0.5 - flat, a big surprise As I said in a comment on a previous entry, America Says has averaged around 450K viewers for its last three prime time runs (December 5-7). Maybe GSN has finally found a way to lessen their reliance on Harvey Feud . Overall, GSN's prime time numbers perked up from the previous week. The network drew 376K/255K viewers prime time/total day for the week of December 3-9. GSN ranked 36th and 32nd in the windows.
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GSN and kids

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A thread on Game Show Paradise actually bashes GSN! Yes, I know it's hard to believe that an oldies board would bash the cable network, but it did happen. All right, I'll go easy on the sarcasm. Of course, GSN is not beloved on the oldies boards because it mostly runs game shows with less than twenty years of dust on them. But this particular thread dumps on GSN for its "Kids Zone" of children's shows which ran in the late 1990s. I can barely recall the Kids Zone, except that it seemed mostly dull. GSP seems to think the Zone was just awful because, well, they usually think GSN is just awful in general. This is the board that once went nuts because they thought GSN was going to run Toddlers and Tiaras . One poster is really out to lunch, though, on FCC rules and regs... I think GSN's Kids Zone block was originally designed to meet U.S. Government laws requiring networks to air the bare minimum of three hours of educational/informational programming for young
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