25 words in the fall

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 like its hoary ancestor. Good luck in the syndie wars next fall.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Paging Mr. Deetjen

Image
Hadn't stopped by Game Show Forum for a while. I landed on this weird thread about Buzzr's acquisition of Classic Concentration . Apparently the original poster intended a parody of some wrestler's comments from long, long ago. Nobody got the reference, which was understandable. But I noticed another goof in the original post... Ron Garfield, whether he mortgaged his house one time, maybe two times, maybe three times, came up with the right figure for NBC to air Classic Concentration on his network. Uh, no. Ron Garfield doesn't work for Buzzr any more. Check his LinkedIn page if you don't believe me. The new general manager of Buzzr is Mark Deetjen, who also plays a little poker in his spare time. Maybe the poker skills came in handy in the Classic Concentration deal. There was an exec shakeup at Buzzr earlier this year, which seems to have strongly affected the diginet's direction. I commented before when oldies fans at Game Show Paradise didn't know ...
Read more

Yeah, they were game show hosts

Image
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...
Read more

Ratings: a couple of new highs for syndies

Image
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...
Read more