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A while back I posted a faux tweet about Laura Overcash, a Let's Make a Deal contestant with a name that's beyond wonderful for the genre. Laura's appearance on LMAD has now come and gone, and she gets a long contestant story in her hometown newspaper (or web site). One thing I didn't know: Let's Make a Deal will rent costumes to people who don't have outlandish duds of their own. She picked the pirate outfit, which looked okay on the show (see screenshot). Laura also sounds a little suspicious of the production staff... There's no doubt in my mind there are spies mixed in with the real audience. So be friendly with other contestants, laugh a lot, tell stories and be yourself, because you never know if you are talking to a real audience member or a paid member of the show. Never thought of that myself. Of course, I don't plan on being a contestant on a game show, but it can't hurt to be bubbly with everyone in sight. You never know when you might

The weather gets colder as we head into the peak viewing months. Most syndies saw some benefits, including our little genre. TV News Check has the happy household ratings for the week of November 12-18... Family Feud 6.6 - up four ticks to a season high Wheel of Fortune 6.4 - up three ticks to its own season high Jeopardy 6.4 - up four ticks to, yes, a season high Millionaire 1.7 - up a couple ticks to, you guessed it, a season high Funny You Should Ask 0.5 - flat as almost always, every party has a pooper Finally got some numbers on the new season for GSN's America Says . The show drew 311K viewers and a 0.05 18-49 rating on November 28. That's not awful by GSN's prime time standards, but it's not so great, either. Next day America Says perked up to 363K viewers. Overall, GSN got 389K/265K viewers prime time/total day for November. The network ranked 33rd and 28th in the windows.

Game Show Garbage takes some time off from trashing game shows to discuss Buzzr and make a few 2019 predictions for the oldies diginet. The article starts with an odd note: the only recent addition to Buzzr's schedule that "people would call remotely a dud" is the syndie What's My Line . That's news to me. I think the dud is Classic Concentration , a slow, rather boring show. There's no disputing tastes. GSG then notes the obvious: Buzzr has moved to an online strategy instead of attempts to expand further on conventional TV. The site says that cord cutting and higher costs are responsible for the change in direction. The real explanation, of course, is that an (almost) all-oldies game show channel has little appeal outside a small group of hardcore nostalgia buffs. But I don't expect Game Show Garbage to be quite so blunt. The predictions for Buzzr in 2019 include the acquisition of the thoroughly mediocre Shop Til You Drop and (gasp) Steve Harvey'

Hard to believe, but the prime story in Google News about game shows right now concerns the Detroit Lions. You may not be much of a football fan (like me) but you may still have heard about the Lions' record of futility when it comes to Super Bowl appearances. Well, actually there haven't been any Super Bowl appearances for the poor Detroiters. Jeopardy couldn't resist rubbing it in... As of 2018, this NFC North team had never even made the Super Bowl, much less won it. But by 2030? Gotta happen, right? To make the team's humiliation even worse, the pictured contestant immediately nailed the Lions as the not-so-successful team. Okay, all sports franchises have their ups and downs. My hometown baseball team, the Texas Rangers, have never won the World Series, though they did get to the Fall Classic a couple times. (One appearance was an excruciatingly close loss to the Cardinals in 2011.) Sports are trivial, anyway, though lots of money changes hands in the business. A

Looks like my weekly ratings entries will have a new syndie in fall 2019. 25 Words or Less is set for national syndication after a three-week trial run last summer. The Fox O&O's are leading the charge with the syndication effort. So far the passable Password knockoff has cleared 40% of the country. I gave the show a mostly favorable review, though I thought the pace dawdled now and then. But when they played the lightning rounds - sorry for the Password references, but they're unavoidable with this knockoff - things got quite lively. Meredith Vieira hosts. Obviously, she's no comedian and not particularly quick with a quip. But this show can tolerate an Allen Ludden type - there I go again with the Password associations - and newsperson Meredith fits the bill. "I don't need 25 words to say how excited I am to host this fabulous game. Everyone will love playing along," says Meredith. She's right that the show has definite play-along value, just li

At the bottom of this blog is a little dissertation on copyright issues, among other items. As people so often say on the Internet, I'm not a lawyer and I don't play one on the web. I can say that I've never had any copyright complaints about anything on this blog. In ten years I've only had one request to take down an image, and it had nothing to do with copyright. (GSN didn't want a photo from the pilot of their Pyramid remake to get out ahead of the debut.) The reason for my sudden concern with copyright is this thread from Game Show Forum . Of course, the thread is about old game shows...in particular, copyright notices on old game shows. Back in the golden olden days a lot of game shows didn't bother with copyright notices at the end of each episode. One poster suggests that the change to today's more legalistic approach might have happened thanks to a new copyright law in the seventies. Who knows? In general the copyright status of old TV shows, incl

In the previous post I mentioned that America Says will get 24 weekly runs on GSN beginning next week. This got me wondering about the other heavy-duty shows in our little game show network's lineup. So I started counting eps on GSN's online schedule for the week of November 26-December 2. The champ will surprise nobody and irritate many on the game show Interwebs. Although it's lost twenty weekday runs over the past few months, Family Feud still clocks in with 84 weekly showings. Cue the wailing and gnashing of teeth on the oldies boards. The second-place show is a small surprise. Cash Cab gets 34 runs per week. Most of the taxi action happens on the weekends, with long marathons on both Saturday and Sunday. The third-ranked show is even more surprising, old reliable Match Game with 30 weekly runs, all on weekdays. It's safe to say that of all the game show oldies, MG gets the best numbers, considering its heavy use on both GSN and Buzzr. That's appropriate eno

It may be bustling at the malls, but there's not much game show news on Black Friday. So I stopped by Game Show Paradise for the first time in a while. I figured there might be some comments on GSN's oldie marathons over the Thanksgiving weekend. Sure enough, the GSN schedule thread chatted about the skeins. Naturally, there were only comments about the old shows. If you were looking for any posts about the America Says marathon on Game Show Paradise , you're clueless about the board. 25K Pyramid got a ten-ep string, and one enterprising poster extracted the episode information from the source code for the GSN schedule site. I happened to watch a bit of this marathon and enjoyed the old-time Password knockoff (and improvement). But as I expected, some GSP posters were too busy complaining about the skein to enjoy it. A typical post... Not only no '84, but also no November-December '83, no January-May '85, and no April-October '87. Oh, darn . No April, 1

Is Cosmopolitan still around? Why, yes it it, as I discovered to my surprise. I don't mean the paper magazine. I have no idea if the dead-tree version of the 1970s artifact is still with us. But Cosmopolitan definitely has a web site. They just posted a catty (of course) article on Millionaire host Chris Harrison's net worth. Cosmo offers few solid numbers, as anybody could predict. Math is hard, as Barbie once said before the p.c. police shut her up, and Cosmo writers would no doubt agree. Instead, the article rambles through low-level snark about Harrison's various jobs, including a swipe at Millionaire , "which yes, is still a show, how dare you even ask." (That's more irritating condescension toward game shows, but again I'll let it pass.) Finally, they offer a net worth figure of $16 million, gleaned from another site. At least they give the site credit. Cosmo opines that Chris' net worth is "an insanely huge amount of money." I d

A while back I grumped so much about Jeopardy's stunts that I feel a little guilty about the contestants on the show's teen tournament. So I'll try to make up for my churlishness with an entry on the tournament winner, Claire Sattler. The 17-year-old high school senior took home a hundred grand, though the linked story notes that California has already relieved her of seven thousand, and the feds have yet to be heard from. No matter, she'll still have a nice nest egg for college, where she plans to major in biomedical engineering. That sounds like a pretty tough major, so she'll probably need all her Jeopardy smarts. She did miss the final clue of her last ep: "It's the official fruit of the District of Columbia." Remember those cherry blossoms? But Claire was so far ahead of her competitors that she wagered nothing and coasted home with the big money. Good luck on her future endeavors.

The week of November 5-11 was not so memorable for syndie game shows. There were no gainers and some minor losers. But the damage was not severe. The top three shows finished within a couple tenths of a point of each other. TV News Check has all the household ratings... Family Feud 6.2 - down a couple ticks Wheel of Fortune 6.1 - flat, which was pretty good this week Jeopardy 6.0 - down a tick Millionaire 1.5 - down a tick, a so-so season so far Funny You Should Ask 0.5 - flat at the number etched in stone Keep It Spotless kept turning in spotless ratings for Nick, hitting a high of 953K viewers on November 13. Showrunner John Cena thanks you for your support. Not much change from last week for GSN. The network got 383K/273K viewers prime time/total day for November 12-18. GSN ranked 34th and 28th in the windows.

Hospital stories about The Price is Right legend Bob Barker are coming fast and furious lately. Mr. Barker is back in the hospital for the same back issues that cause him trouble last month. As I've said from the start of these problems, it's always hard to tell exactly what's going on. The more lurid media outlets put Bob at death's door. The more respectable sites are noncommittal on just how critical the medical issues are. I've linked to the story from People , which (a little unbelievably) is one of the more sober sources for celeb news. The site passes along a positive note from Mr. Barker's manager that the game show icon is "doing okay, [and] hopefully he'll get discharged today." The strangest description of the medical problems came from former TPiR showrunner Roger Dobkowitz last month. He posted about a "crack" in Bob's back. Don't ask me what that means, or how this story will finally develop.

The Wheelmobile rolled into Savannah, GA and hundreds of aspiring contestants turned out. It looks like old faithful Marty Lublin ran the audition in the linked video, though he didn't get a credit in the news report. A local TV newsperson named Tina Tyus-Shaw was also part of the festivities. Don't know if anybody among the throng of wannabes will make it to the show. They'll probably pick at least a few from the crowd, just to make sure that folks keep showing up at future Wheelmobile stops. The wheel at the audition was the cut-rate vertical version of the 2,400-pound monstrosity on the actual show. You can't expect the Wheelmobile to tote so much tonnage around the country. But the audition worked reasonably like the brightly colored version of hangman we all know and love. Good luck to the would-be contestants.

A little while ago I wrote that Game Show Forum doesn't always dwell on stuff that happened three (or more) decades ago. That's true to some extent, but the oldies board does spend a lot of time on events from TV's equivalent of the Jurassic Period. A case in point is a bunch of posts about a judgment call on a contestant's answer in Super Password's bonus round. I don't want to get into the gory details of the call. Instead, I'm going to pick a tiny nit with one poster who slammed Bert Convy in the thread... First of all, having the producers give Bert a complex explanation to say and have him do it without mucking it up sounds like a tall order.  Seconds, network standards and practices were taken dead seriously behind the scenes, and they may have had to discuss with S&P during the commercial break in which they both came to the correct conclusion. I always thought Convy was a reasonably competent host. Sure, he had his bloopers and goofs, but

A little while ago Netflix acquired a bunch of Jeopardy eps. As a binge pundit notes, this sets up a question... To Binge or Not to Binge. Now, I know you're probably thinking: "Wow, The Chronicle is really scraping the bottom of the barrel," but hear me out. Jeopardy is one of the most binge-able shows around. Once you cut out the commercials, it becomes a solid 20 minutes of interesting trivia. There's some irritating condescension toward game shows in that comment, but I'll let it pass. Especially because the binge pundit ends up really enjoying the only game show with a Peabody. At least he has the endearing modesty to admit that he got a bunch of questions wrong. Though he doesn't mind exulting when he gets an answer right and the guys in the Tournament of Champions goof it up. He also finds Alex Trebek "a smarmy host with smug jokes and looks." But he thinks that's okay because the smarminess is funny. All in all, his final verdict is dea

Not a lot of hot game show news today, so I rambled around the Internet boards. Found this question at Sitcoms Online ... Has Price is Right done a new game of any kind this season? If so, could I see a clipping of it? I haven't been watching this season's episodes because I've been really busy. When in doubt on TPiR trivia, I check Golden Road . From what I can tell, The Price is Right hasn't rolled out any completely new games this season. But they did unveil a much-remarked refurbishment of 3 Strikes. The general reaction at Golden Road seemed to be positive, and one poster gave a link to a YouTube video of the new and improved version of the pricing game. (The game begins at 2:50 in the video.) Sad to say, the first playing of the new 3 Strikes ended in a strikeout. I was rooting hard for the winsome contestant, and she lasted long enough to figure out the price of the BRAND NEW CAR . But she pulled the third strike ball before she could use the information. So

This is a full service game show blog, so I have to track a little more of the love lives of the stars. While things seem to be improving for Wheel of Fortune's Vanna White in the affairs-of-the-heart department, The Price is Right's Drew Carey recently had a setback. He called off his engagement to Amie Harwick, a "family and marriage therapist." There was a notable age difference between the couple, but I don't want to sound snooty and old-fashioned. Drew's had a somewhat tangled history with the ladies, as Us Weekly points out in the linked story. A four-year engagement to Nicole Jaracz ended in 2012... Though Carey wasn't the biological father of Jaracz' teenage son, the Whose Line Is It Anyway? star had been known to refer to him as his son on social media. The story still mentions Whose Line instead of The Price is Right ? Sounds like Us Weekly is a little out-of-date. Oh well, life goes on.

The weather gets colder and the Nielsen numbers get better. It's been a pattern in commercial TV for a few years now, like sixty or seventy. Syndie game shows were no exception in the week of October 29-November 4. TV News Check posts the rising household ratings... Family Feud 6.4 - up three ticks to a season high Wheel of Fortune 6.1 - up a couple ticks to its own season high Jeopardy 6.1 - flat Millionaire 1.6 - up a tick to its usual number Funny You Should Ask 0.5 - flat at its almost always number Keep It Spotless turned in decent ratings for Nick last week, with an average of 825K viewers over four runs. It got a bigger audience than Double Dare lately. By recent standards GSN only did so-so numbers for the week of November 5-11. 374K/269K viewers prime time/total day. The network ranked 34th and 27th in the windows. Not great but far from awful, especially because GSN remains well below full distribution among cable nets. For the month of October GSN drew 402K/277K

His less than stellar performance at the Pennsylvania governor's debate hasn't hushed Jeopardy's Alex Trebek when it comes to politics. He's now waded into the #MeToo rumpus with a critical comment... You know, when the #MeToo movement started, I had discussions with the staff during production meetings. I said, "My gosh, this has got to be a scary time for men." That may well be true, but he's at least nudging a hornet's nest. Apparently, Alex doesn't think there are any sexual secrets from his past that might torpedo his recently renewed contract with Sony for Jeopardy through the 2021-2022 season... I'm fortunate that I've never been in a position of power where I might be able to lord it over somebody sexually. Yes, that might have been true Final Jeopardy for the quizmaster. He goes on to name drop an example from decades ago... But one reason why a host can succeed for a long time is by not offending. You saw it with Johnny Car

Game Show Forum doesn't spend all their time parsing tiny details of long defunct shows. Once in a while a poster actually comments on something that happened less than three decades ago. For instance, this thread discusses a GSF member's experience at The Price is Right's live show when it trundled through Tunica, MS. Long story short: he had a blast and won $350. Todd Newton helmed this particular show, and the poster burbles with enthusiasm for Todd's hosting skills... I was beyond impressed with both the hosting and announcing [by Todd Newton and Randy West] and their interaction throughout was really great...as much as I have defended CBS's choice of Drew Carey over the years, while I understand their reasoning, they made a mistake not picking Todd Newton...his hosting was effortless and he kept us laughing and engaged throughout...and he and Randy make a great team. According to then TPiR showrunner Roger Dobkowitz, Todd Newton did get an audition for the

Stopped by the GSN site to see if there were any marathons for Thanksgiving weekend. There were. 25K Pyramid and Match Game will get a lot of hours on Thanksgiving Day. Nine in all, if I counted right. Black Friday will see ten hours of Press Your Luck and America Says . No doubt the latter skein will feature plenty of promos for the second season of the lively Family Feud knockoff, which begins on the following Monday. Press Your Luck has always seemed like a overblown exercise in random button-pushing to me, so I'll skip that pile of episodes. I did put the show on my top 50 list, thanks to Michael Larson's brilliant solve. The show also spawned a reasonably successful revival on GSN, and PYL reruns have turned up on several networks over the years. It's got a loyal fanbase out there, and they can have it. The other three shows are terrific, so I may take in some of their marathons. There will be plenty of eps to choose from. UPDATE: On Saturday November 24th, Cash C

Closer seems to be the mild publication in the National Enquirer empire. I've seen a fair number of game show stories on Closer , and they're usually about how nice things are. Case in point: this article about Vanna White's improving love life. She's just so happy with her current boyfriend John Donaldson, who runs a construction equipment company. That doesn't sound glamorous, but it's apparently lucrative enough. Meanwhile, Vanna isn't doing too badly herself. The linked story says she's got a net worth around $50 million. Though they don't give any audited statements to support that number. The story has some pleasant pictures of Vanna and her family. She has two grown kids to go along with that handsome net worth. "Life is not perfect — just try to make the best of it. Be strong, be kind to people, and be happy." Fair enough.

Game Show Newsnet reports that Millionaire maven Ed Toutant has died after a long battle with cancer. He went through one of the stranger sagas of any game show contestant. Mr. Toutant lost on Millionaire in January, 2001 due what turned out to be a bad question. After he found out how the query was wrong, he wrote to the show’s producers. They invited him back and he went all the way to the big prize in September, 2001. The show was running a special promotion at the time of his first episode. So the big prize was even bigger than usual: $1,860,000. GSNN notes that Mr. Toutant was a trivia Hall of Famer. He was a regular player on various live shows, such as the Trivia Conference of North America. Before his Millionaire fame, he played on Jeopardy and The Challengers . GSNN says that Ed Toutant was one of the first people they interviewed, and the site recalls him fondly. R.I.P.

It's so sad when you win big money. Okay, that's a bit of sarcasm. But this long article about Tomorrow Rodriguez, a million dollar winner on Deal or No Deal in 2008, does point out some of the issues with a big windfall. First and foremost - and rather oddly not mentioned in the article - is the major tax bite. Once you render unto Caesar, other problems come along. For instance, relatives and friends start hitting you up for cash. The article advises laying low for a week or so, but your family and acquaintances are going to know about the money, anyway. Then there's the problem of just what to do with the bonanza. Paying off debt is probably a good idea. Socking part of the winnings away in investments won't hurt, either. The article says it's wise to get a financial advisor, which is not a surprise for a CNBC story. I dunno, I was an actuary for nearly forty years and I do most of my own financial advising. But your mileage may vary. And then, when all the iss

Ratings for syndie game shows were pretty blah for the week of October 22-28. But Jeopardy "won" just by standing still. TV News Check has the not so inspiring household ratings... Family Feud 6.1 - down a couple ticks Jeopardy 6.1 - flat, which let the competition come back to it Wheel of Fortune 5.9 - down a tick Millionaire 1.5 - down a tick to a season low Funny You Should Ask 0.5 - flat, as you probably guessed Child Support continues to limp through Friday nights at ABC. The latest run got 2.25M viewers and a 0.5 18-49 rating. But Friday broadcast is so bad nowadays that I can't quite count out the show just yet.

Rummaging through the Interwebs, I came across a Buzzr schedule thread on the game show board at Sitcoms Online . One post in the thread caught my attention, because it was so heretical on an oldies board. Buzzr's reruns of Classic Concentratio n have garnered lots of happy happy joy joy on oldies boards throughout the net. The show hadn't surfaced in decades, so it developed a certain cachet as a hidden treasure. But this post on Sitcoms Online will have none of it... To be perfectly honest, I kinda find Classic Concentration boring!!! As a kid seeing the old Concentration I thought that was pretty boring too! I never really watched it myself but back than without having lots of channels or several TV's like families do now, if someone else in my family was watching it well that was what was on!! There are a few too many exclamation points, but you get the drift. To be honest, I always thought Concentration , in all its forms, was...oh, less than thrilling. No doubt it w

November is here, so game shows are trundling out their sweeps specials. Jeopardy's teen tournament starts November 7. I've grumped a lot about all the Jeopardy specials, with the exception of the Tournament of Champions. The T of C is a truly interesting clash of top contestants. The other tournaments are just attempts to garner a few extra viewers at Nielsen's most crucial times of the year. Not that I have anything against the brainy teenagers competing for quizzer glory on the only game show with a Peabody. Best wishes to all of 'em. I do wonder if Jeopardy sees any real ratings benefit from the stunts. I've never noticed any particularly large bumps in the weekly household numbers when the specials air. Maybe I just don't have data that's detailed enough. The showrunners must think there's some benefit in the stunts, after all. UPDATE: Sweeps months may not mean much of anything any more. Nielsen seems to be "sweeping" all the time. Bu

My game show viewing today has only included a few eps of Cash Cab on GSN. But there's some odd news from Buzzr. Folks say that the oldies diginet has uncorked promos for a Thanksgiving weekend marathon of Great Christmas Light Fight . Fremantle produces this holiday reality show, so it looks like they're trying to get a little more mileage from reruns on Buzzr. Unlike another offbeat Buzzr experiment, Richard Simmons' Dream Maker which was a flop from the first ep, Light Fight has performed quite well for ABC. The show has usually drawn audiences of four to six million, peaking at close to seven million. Not bad at all for super-cheap reality fare. That's why the show has survived for five seasons and will kick off a sixth skein on November 26. The Buzzr reruns are probably just a long promo for that new season on ABC. But maybe somebody at Fremantle has finally decided that Buzzr should at least try to appeal beyond its current audience: a microscopic knot of oldi

Readers of this blog know that I'm not the biggest fan of Alec Baldwin. But I do think he's done a good job on ABC's Match Game reboot. He's kept his worst impulses under control, and he's managed to be funny and - to the extent possible for him - charming. But with Alec Baldwin, you're always just a headline away from another p.r. nightmare. The latest rumpus saw him arrested for allegedly punching another motorist in a parking dispute. These kinds of punch-ups don't come as much of a surprise for the irritable actor, so I don't know what impact this incident will have on his career, especially the Match Game gig. Leaving the police station, Alec Baldwin resolutely ignored reporters, though he later denied everything on Twitter. Unless some really bad photos surface, ABC (and NBC for Saturday Night Live ) will probably stand by him for now. His Sunday night talk show will soon be gone, but that's due to bad ratings, not bad publicity.

Since I visited Buzzr on Facebook, I figured I might as well drop by GSN's page. And as the ancient saying goes, you learn something new every day. I found out that Cash Cab's Ben Bailey and I have the same birthday, October 30. All right, it's not like discovering the secret of the universe. Except for our birthdays, Ben and I don't have much in common. He's 19 years younger and a lot taller than me. Plus, I've never hosted Cash Cab . I've only written about it. There are plenty of nice birthday wishes to Ben on the GSN page. Cash Cab has lots of fans (including me) and they don't mind giving a shout-out - street or mobile - to Ben. GSN has posted an entertaining montage of some of Ben's goofy voices and facial expressions on the show. It really was the gig of a lifetime for him. So this entry is a belated happy birthday greeting to Mr. Bailey. May the cab roll on for a long time at GSN.

Looking over the Buzzr Facebook page is a lot of fun. You get complaints from viewers who are trying to prove that they are more older-is-better than thou. One of the funnier gripes is that Buzzr sometimes cuts fee plugs and parting gifts from ancient game shows. These ads were always particularly irritating for me. An announcer raced through dull huckster text while a static picture of the product hogged the screen. I usually mute commercials of all kinds, and I really enjoy muting these plugs when I see them on Buzzr. But for true believers, the plugs are a sacred part of the oldies experience, and Buzzr Shalt Not Touch Them. I only wish they would cut all the plugs, along with a lot of their other cheapo ads. A slightly more serious complaint is that Buzzr cuts the panel introductions from their color What's My Line eps. I don't usually watch this show, but those intros were dull and time-consuming. The syndie WML inherited the practice from the CBS original, where it sho