Inside

May 30, 2006

        The fall lineups have been presented to the upfront advertising community in New York. No sooner than the ink was dry than NBC was the first to make adjustments, one of which involves your current favorite prime time game show.
     Most glaring is what is not on the schedules, where the time slots are shifting and what may be held in reserve:

     STAYING PUT: Deal or No Deal (Monday), Survivor, The Bachelor.

     THE MISSING: The Apprentice, a victim of too much Trump---though we'll see him back with the Los Angeles business big-mouths in January.

     TIME SHIFTING: Dancing with the Stars, The Amazing Race (a surprise) and the second weekly edition of Deal or No Deal.

     IN RESERVE: All of the Endemol game shows sold to ABC, Fox and NBC, The Apprentice, Unan1mous, Game Show Marathon and America's Got Talent.

      CELEBRITY MILLIONAIRE:  On paper, this all looked great....take a format which has become a national mania and see how celebrities function in the hotseat.  Sure, the early ratings were through the roof (a 40 share the first night, which is almost unheard of today, even for American Idol).   Unfortunately, this evolved (shall we say deteriorated?) into a notorious example of network greed in overdoing a stunt.

      People tend to forget that first celebrity featured some of the biggest and then-hottest names in entertainment.  Ray Romano had the most popular sitcom on television.  Drew Carey was one of ABC's biggest stars.  Rosie O'Donnell was always excessively hyped but she loved playing the game.  Lance Bass was the quintessential music heartthrob.  Millionaire, likewise, was as dominant at that point as Idol is today.  

      However, we still hold to the view that the over-reliance on stars, as opposed to overexposure of four nights a week, is what killed WWTBAM in network prime time.  Go back through television history and you'll never find a game which was saved by going to a celebrity format when the show was created for conventional contestants.  Hollywood Squares was a big-time celebrity show but regular folks won the money and the prizes.  Monty Hall told us when he added stars for a season in syndication for Let's Make a Deal, "It didn't do one thing for us in the ratings.  In fact, we actually lost ground."  The original Price Is Right added a celebrity panelist for its final two seasons but that did not stem the downward spiral.

      Perhaps had the celebrities played for home viewers who sent in postcards, a far better connection would have been made over the long haul than playing for the YMCA in Oshkosh.  A charity has never brought a single viewer to a television show except during telethons.  Viewers began to weary of the assistance up to $32,000, which was the equivalent of watching an intentional walk in baseball.  Those life-changing moments of average people were severely reduced and compromised.  Let's hope NBC does not resort to this with Deal or No Deal.

     PASSWORD ALL-STARS:  This was a desperation effort to save a beloved and classic show in 1975 which probably should have been canceled, based on its ratings, a year earlier.  Allen Ludden generated at least two viewer mail campaigns which extended the show's life but an all-celebrity format every day was a terrible idea.

     The show resembled something Password was not.  If you watch a couple of the few surviving shows which circulate in tape trading circles, you can sense Allen was clearly ill at ease attempting to keep the game's pace moving in the midst of the constant chirping of the celebrities.  Viewers complained so loudly that the format reverted to a variation on the classic with conventional players and celebs for the final 13 weeks.  Too late.  Too many viewers disappeared during All-Stars and never returned.

     Paula Poundstone on TO TELL THE TRUTH:  She had a limited following with some younger audiences because of her comedy but someone forgot to tell her or teach her how to play the game.  Poundstone was far more focused on getting her comedy over than asking intelligent questions of the challengers.  The ultimate came one day when she rambled on incoherently during her entire question period and never asked a single thing of any of the imposters.  Quipped host John O'Hurley instantly after the bell:  "That was certainly a waste of a full minute of network time."  Poundstone may have been a talented comic but she also may have been the worst panelist in the history of game shows.

     CBS moving I'VE GOT A SECRET to 10:30 for its final season:  This has been thoroughly detailed in part 1 of our Classic Moment interview with the late Steve Allen but the network obviously had no intention other than killing the show in 1966-67 with this.  After five years of strong numbers at 8 o'clock when families could enjoy Secret, CBS replaced it with two very bad (not bad...but very bad) sitcoms which both failed in 13 weeks.  At 10:30, the kids were in bed and against ABC's The Big Valley, the game was over.

     NBC turning SNAP JUDGMENT into PASSWORD:  This was another desperation move to keep Ed McMahon's early morning game of the late '60s on the air after two years.  It also did nothing to save the show.  The original Snap Judgment was an acceptable enough game and had a bonus round called The Big 5.  So, in a misguided attempt to fool viewers, the name elements of the original Snap were merely transferred.  The Password lighting round was called The Big 5.  Why not just do Password?  The things some networks do are stunning.

     Premature cancellations of YOU DON'T SAY! and THE MATCH GAME:  NBC brought in a new daytime executive in the summer of 1969 who proclaimed he was "going to remake the network."  He sure did.  Tom and Betty Kennedy had just moved into a new home when Tom received a call telling him You Don't Say! was done in four weeks.  Tom initially thought the news was a joke.  No joke.  Gene Rayburn's hilarious lead-out was going, too.  Here was the rub:  the week the show was canceled, You Don't Say! was NBC's highest-rated daytime show and The Match Game was still beating CBS's Linkletter Show and Dark Shadows, though the ABC Gothic soap consistently skewed younger.  You Don't Say!'s replacement, Bright Promise---a soap starring Anne Jeffreys, never clicked and NBC wallowed through two bombs, Letters to Laugh-in and Name Droppers, at 4 o'clock.  Even the soap Somerset, which managed six years in the old Match Game slot, failed to match the best ratings of Match Game.

     NBC allowing LET'S MAKE A DEAL to escape to ABC:  This ultimately could be labeled the greatest mistake in the history of daytime game shows.  NBC's failure to comprehend the value of Monty Hall's series is still incomprehensible.  The refusal to recognize the show's prime time potential after it became a top ten hit on Sunday nights in 1967 was a further boner.  That was the shot which started the tensions between Hall and NBC.  ABC was thrilled to get Deal in December 1968 and was more than glad to offer a nighttime version.  Its entire afternoon lineup rose in the Nielsens and NBC's consequently declined to number three.

     Premature cancellations of GREED and TWENTY ONE in 2000:  These were prime examples of network executives who wanted the chase of Millionaire to end quickly and literally took a guillotine to these shows.  What was bad enough were the insulting remarks about the genre by CBS's Les Moonves and NBC's Scott Sassa and Garth Ancier.  Moonves told The Associated Press, "Winning Lines is not the type of show we would ordinarily schedule," and Ancier said a few weeks later:  "I hope this flirtation with game shows will soon be over so we can get back to the things we do best----shows with a script."  Yet, the week before NBC axed Twenty One, the show---which was dragged all over NBC's schedule and had been a consistent winner on Wednesday nights---came within one rating point of the NCAA basketball championship game.  Greed was a regular time slot winner on Friday nights until WNYW in New York began pre-empting the show for baseball games and airing it at 1 a.m.  Lose your prime time slot in the nation's top market and you're sunk.  Ironically, Greed was renewed as a midseason replacement for 2000-01.  In one fell swoop on a summer afternoon, only days after their appointments as Fox's new programming chiefs, Gail Berman and Preston Beckman ordered the set struck, canceled the midseason order, and killed taping of the last six episodes.  Beckman reportedly had a hate for game shows which bordered on bigotry.  One can only wonder what may have happened if NBC and Fox had left the shows alone.

     Fred Silverman as co-executive producer of TWENTY ONE:  How this happened in 2000 is still a puzzler.  Silverman, the former programming wunderkind at CBS and ABC before running into a brick wall at NBC, made a mint with formats which brought back classic male stars in the '80s and '90s (Raymond Burr, Dick Van Dyke, Andy Griffith, Carroll O'Connor, William Conrad).  Yet, he canceled more game shows than any executive in television history.  He sat on the pilot for The Hollywood Squares for 18 months when he ran CBS daytime and let the option run out.  He tampered with the formats of Password and To Tell the Truth in their final seasons during the sixties before he canceled them both.  He never bought a single new game show for the network.  When he moved to ABC, he quickly killed two games, including the time slot-winning Break the Bank, to expand soap operas and sent Let's Make a Deal to its death in an impossible time slot.  At NBC, his ill-advised decision to schedule David Letterman for 90 minutes in the morning when Letterman's young following was at work or in college classes cropped another three game shows from the Peacock lineup in one slash, including the venerable Hollywood Squares.  Silverman was a master scheduler and I still consider him an icon, despite the NBC debacle, but The Man with the Golden Gut was also The Game Show Gremlin.  How he ended up associated with Twenty One is another of those ambiguities of television.

    Jackie Gleason's YOU'RE IN THE PICTURE:  Still considered the biggest bomb in The Great One's----and game show----history, the only thing this one-night wonder set up was one of the most masterful and transparent live half-hours in television history when Gleason, unscripted and unvarnished, apologized to the audience "for insulting your intelligence."  Interestingly, in our interviews with the two surviving panelists from You're in the Picture, Pat Harrington Jr. and Pat Carroll, the two comedy stars disputed historians who said the game show disaster might have killed Gleason's career without the apology.  "He was just too big of a talent," said Harrington.

     100 GRAND:  Almost no one remembers this one, with every good reason.  Only four years after the house of cards crumbled with the big-money quiz scandals, this was the attempt of ABC---which never had a megabucks quiz in the '50s---to bring them back.  The effort was almost stillborn, dying in three weeks.  Password announcer Jack Clark was the host and the only redeeming virtue.  100 Grand had arguably the most complex rules ever for a game show (some publications say the rule book itself was more than 150 pages).  The show had glass bubbles rather than isolation booths and the format loosely resembled the later Double Dare (the Alex Trebek CBS game, not the Marc Summers jump-in-the-Jello fest).  Candid Camera absolutely pasted this show in the ratings.  So little was thought of it, about 35 ABC affiliates did not even carry it.

      THE PRICE IS RIGHT opposite THE COSBY SHOW/FAMILY TIES (1986):  CBS attempted this for six weeks in the summer because Price attracted the exact opposite demographic profile of Cosby.  Even a few hints were passed that had any inkling of success surfaced, this might have been repeated at midseason.  So strong was The Cosby Show in those days that even breaking news of an enemy attack would have lost in the ratings.  Even in the rerun season, the Huxtables and the Keatons won over Bob Barker by a 3-to-1 margin, ending any hope of an '80s network game show revival.

       MATCH GAME in the morning on CBS:  This was the death knell from which this show never recovered.  Match Game of the '70s was an after-school, housewife taking a break before preparing supper, laughfest.  To shuffle this off to mid-morning was suicide.  Its one-time companion Tattletales never worked in the morning but CBS seemed far more interested in dispensing reruns of M*A*S*H or One Day at a Time in the afternoon before they went into their syndication runs.

       NAME THAT TUNE as a five-day-a-week show:  How could I possibly say that about my favorite game of all time?  Easy.  A musical show simply gobbles up too much material too fast as a daily show and the songs which are understandable to viewers are repeated too often.  When Dennis James and Tom Kennedy both did the NBC versions that failed in the '70s, I felt as if I was hearing "Bali Hai" every other week.  The same thing was true with the Jim Lange version in 1984-85.  This show was a genuine classic but it worked best as a nighttime weekly, which is probably why it was a huge success in syndication in the '70s and was gone in 26 weeks twice on network daytime.

       WHOOPI GOLDBERG on The Hollywood Squares:  I can hear the howls right now from the Whoopi fans.  True, the first two years, the show had strong ratings (though never in the syndicated top 10) because King World paid top dollar for some of Whoopi's pals and bigger names to play the game.  Yet, the third and fourth year, the show crashed in the ratings by 48 percent.  Henry Winkler and Michael Levitt as producers worked a miracle just to stem the bleeding in years five and six.

       You need only go back to our interview from four years ago with Peter Marshall on this one.  Roger and Michael King wanted Peter to be a consultant to the new version in 1998.  The former emcee said no but the King brothers wanted Marshall's advice.  He told them:  "Do not hire Whoopi Goldberg.  She has her following but a lot of people just don't like that woman and she'll eventually turn off the audience."  The internal focus group research during the third and fourth years backed Peter's theory.  After two years, the audience had too much Whoopi, too much of the director cutting to her for a reaction during every single celebrity question and too much of her being billed as the star of the show while the excellent Tom Bergeron was reduced to a supporting player as emcee.  The audience drifted away sharply in the third and fourth years and had stations not contracted to carry the show through 2004, Squares would have been gone two years earlier.

        TELL IT TO GROUCHO (1962):  I love Groucho.  You Bet Your Life to this day is one of the funniest shows in the history of television.  The game was incidental to those great exchanges between Groucho and the contestants.  I wish Rich Cronin would break down and buy the reruns and schedule them late night on weekends because they still hold up and with the right promotion, they'd get numbers.

        Yet, after 11 years on television, the show had run its course in 1961.  CBS tried to push Groucho back on the air with a filmed celebrity picture quiz less than a year after You Bet Your Life was canceled.  He never should have done it.  Adding a couple of early twentysomethings as his sidekicks was too much counterpoint just for the sake of young faces.  The game was a dud.  If You Bet Your Life had run out of steam, no evidence suggested trying Groucho again four months later in a weaker format would work.  It didn't.  Dr. Kildare and My Three Sons saw to that.

All in the Game Extra (Audio)

A Quick Followup

       Briefly acknowledging many of your reactions to our column about the most significantly miscast emcees in game show history, we received a number of additional interesting considerations but two were consensus choices to be added to the list:

       Rolf Benirschke, WHEEL OF FORTUNE:  I do so agree.  The former San Diego Chargers kicker, who is one of the nicest human beings anywhere, must have shown something in his audition which never surfaced on the air.  This was the most coveted emcee job in Hollywood when Pat Sajak left the daytime show to do his ill-fated CBS late night talk show.  At one point, speculation was high that creator Merv Griffin was going to name himself host.  The ultimate finalists were Benirschke and sportscaster Tim Brando, who should have been awarded the job.  For whatever reason, Rolf just didn't have it and when the daytime show moved to CBS, Bob Goen took over.  Perhaps the reason we left Rolf off of our list is because he was so humble and honest on the E! documentary about Wheel last year, acknowledging the role of game show host was probably something he never should have done.  He's a fine family man and has gone on to do well for himself in private business.

       Louie Anderson, FAMILY FEUD:  I'll concur as well.  Louie has his fans but he was not easy to deal with on the set and one of the reasons Richard Karn was hired four years ago was to end the behind-the-scenes turmoil.  Some of the personal issues going on with Louie were also contributing factors.      

  
All in the Game (Jan. 1)
All in the Game (Jan. 8)
All in the Game (Jan. 15)
All in the Game (Feb. 26)
All in the Game (March 6)
All in the Game (March 16)
All in the Game (April 17)

Coming Soon