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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...