Stick a fork

A faux tweet noted that GSN will drop Card Sharks and 25K Pyramid on October 1 in favor of three hours of Match Game each weekday.

I'm happy that the greatest game show of all time can still hold its own in the rough and tumble of commercial TV. But I knew the reaction on the oldies boards would be less than favorable. Sure enough, the thread on the subject at Game Show Forum started out by proving my remark that the "online game show community" is often clueless about the real world. A couple posters actually wrote...

I know when most of us heard that BUZZR scored Classic Concentration, most of us were saying something to the effect of “GSN should throw in the towel, BUZZR has won!"

In all honesty, one of my first thoughts when Buzzr scored CC was, "maybe, perhaps, NBC decided to sell it lock-stock-barrel to Fremantle". I wouldn't know if that *was* the case, but nonetheless, that was a heck of a scoop on Buzzr's part. Now if Buzzr lands "Scrabble", I guess we can finally stick the fork in GSN. I have a small feeling that that subject will be more a matter of "when", and not "if".

Uh, yeah. GSN is a top thirty cable network, and Buzzr is a largely unwatched diginet. I'm sure that GSN should "throw in the towel," and Scrabble on Buzzr will be the final death blow. Even if the posters were only talking about GSN's appeal to game show hardcores, the language was way over the top.

Such hilarity was too much even for other Game Show Forum posters. One of them tried to inject a little reality into the thread...

I love what Buzzr is doing, but their viewership is likely made up of hardcore fans and those longing for nostalgia. Even if they get 10-20K at a time, that's a very tiny blip in the world of cable and less than Harvey Feud ratings by a mile. I don't have hard ratings numbers, just speculation.

It's true that there are few if any published numbers on Buzzr's TV viewership, though the diginet's Twitch feed plays to a usual audience of about a hundred or less (seventy-five as I type). There are plenty of hard numbers on GSN, though. The network regularly draws a total day average of over a quarter-million viewers. This is, no doubt, at least an order of magnitude bigger than Buzzr's viewership.

With a bit of the real world acknowledged, other posters noted that GSN shows like Deal or No Deal and Cash Cab are getting plenty of age on them, too. In fact, they're as old as many of the "classics" were on GSN when the channel first flickered into life in 1994. GSN's lineup is downright grizzled by normal TV standards.

UPDATE: The thread went on to chat about GSN's new YouTube logo (see screenshot). One poster showed that he's plenty out of touch when he said that GSN is "rebranding" to "Game Show Network." Of course, GSN has been using that name for a long time now on the TV network. I haven't seen the YouTube logo on TV or the web site, but it might be coming soon.