BuzzerBlog

It happened again, but this time, a lot more skillfully.  See what I mean.

[flv:http://www.gameshowvideos.com/flv/C21win2.flv 320 240]

We really need one of those “We Called It!” signs that The Colbert Report has.  One of our good friends from England, David Howell, recently got back from a taping of the revival of the The Rich List.  This new edition was taping on the English version set so we thank him greatly for going.  A lot of really big shocking information was given about the show too.  GSN’s really trying some new things.

First off, it’s looking like it’s going to be an hour long show with two full games an hour.  Works just fine for me.  Wondering why Fred Roggin’s still been gone from GSN Live?  He’s the host of the new show which has been changed from The Rich List to The Money List.  If you don’t watch GSN Live, he also works with NBC Sports and was just away for the Olympics.  The format is the same as any version.  Just wager how many items from a list you can name.  Whichever team is challenged has to name the number of items they listed.  Whichever team finishes two lists wins the game and plays for $50,000 in the end game.  And for a first in GSN game shows: there are returning champions.  If you win, you can come back and potentially win a boatload of money.  About time GSN does this.

 
And there you have it.  One thing I’ve always wanted GSN to do is an hour long big money primetime game show, and they chose a decent one here.  It seemed to split the game show crowd, but it never got a real fair chance here.  It’s also been a success to some degree in every country it’s been on except here so it’s not like the show was a bust everywhere like Power of 10 sadly was.  We’ll get official information in the upcoming weeks, but for now, GSN may have something interesting on their hands.

We’ve known about these for a while, but just for safety we’ll talk about it again.  GSN is planning a whole series of Play it Back: Game Shows marathons, celebrating different games from the 70s, 80s, and 90s.  Each Sunday night in September involves a different decade’s shows followed by a special hour long documentary about the best and funniest moments.  On September 7th is the 70s marathon Dating Game, Let’s Make a Deal, and Match Game from 1PM to 7PM E.  September 14th has the 80s shows Card Sharks, Press Your Luck, and $25,000 Pyramid.  Finally on the 21st we have the 90s featuring Wheel of Fortune, Ray Combs Family Feud, and Regis Philbin Who Wants to be a Millionaire? for the millionth time.

Following each of those marathons will be an hour long documentary called Play it Back hosted by the popular comedienne Caroline Rhea, who previously appeared on shows like Biggest Loser and Celebrity Blackjack, not to mention hosting her own talk show which no one remembers.  Wait, I do!  On the 70s documentary, you’ll learn more about such shows as Match Game, Dating Game, Newlywed Game, Hollywood Squares and Family Feud. On the 80s, we have Super Password, Tic Tac Dough, Love Connection, Family Feud and Wheel of Fortune and finally on 90s night we see Wheel of Fortune, Hollywood Squares, Family Feud, Jeopardy and Who Wants to be a Millionaire?.

I feel I better answer this question: where are new PDFs?  We haven’t been sent them in a while.  No one’s gotten them in a while, actually.  GSN sends out Excel and PDFs.  We’ve only have Excel files and that only shows what programs are in what time slots.  No actual details are shown on those so there’s no point in releasing them.

Sorry for no updates yesterday.  I was really busy and if one of our many writers doesn’t write anything beyond me, nothing shows up.  I’ll try to fix that.  But it’s been extremely slow regardless.  Valleycrest Productions provided us with a pictures of Who Wants to be a Millionaire’s new “Millionaire Menu”, though.  It’s similar to a picture we posted a bit ago.  Interesting new look, though.

Courtesy of Valleycrest Productions Ltd.

Still no idea who the show is for, but at least for the pilot, the new competition/variety show Let Me Entertain You, Rossi Moreale is the host.  If you enjoy ritualistic abuse, you may remember him as the host of the newly canceled Temptation.  Maybe I’m missing something, but is there any great talent in Rossi that I’m not seeing.  All I’m getting with him right now is, “Eh he’s good looking.  Women will watch.  Let’s get him.”  Maybe I’m wrong.

Valleycrest Productions provided us with a glimpse at the new Who Wants to be a Millionaire? question graphics, but we still have no idea about the new money chain graphics or anything else.  The question screen looks extremely nice, though.  Much better than any other I’ve seen.  As always, click on the thumbnails to expand.

A press release for the second season of GSN’s Bingo America came out tonight.  I have to be honest, even though I do like some of the changes, portions of it leave me confused.  We’ll get to that in a minute.  First off, reitterating what we said before, Richard Karn is the new host.  I still think he’ll do fine with the show and be a hell of a lot more entertaining and livelier than former host Patrick Duffy ever was.

We have a new end game which is slightly better too.  It’s not made specifically clear, but it seems you have the same bonus board as before, as pictured to the left.  Each row is hiding some “wrecking balls” behind numbers, and each row has more than the last.  All totaled up, there are 20 up there.  You pick a number, and if you avoid the wrecking ball you can take your money and go home or play the next level.  If you hit a wrecking ball at any time you lose everything earned up to that point, but if you can make it through all the letters, you win $100,000.  For home players, if the studio numbers picked match your home numbers, you are a winner as well.  It’s still not the best thing on earth, but it’s a hell of a lot better than the dumb matching game.  I have to give them some credit for improving there.

The rest is staying the same it seems, so no major changes beyond an added audience game.  Here’s what really confuses me though.  It’s debuting Monday, October 6th, at 6:30PM ET.  Really, 6:30PM ET?  You couldn’t have pushed Whammy, which airs at 7:00PM ET, back a half hour and put your headlining original at a decent time slot?  Unless 6:30PM ET is some magic slot that gets great ratings that we don’t know about.  That time slot just spells trouble to me.  Especially for this season, for which 65 episodes were ordered unlike GSN’s recent normal order of 40.  It’ll repeat weekends at 4:00PM ET, which replaces something that I have no idea about since schedules haven’t been sent out in eons.

Tonight’s a very important and interesting night for NBC.  Basically their sole savior regular series at this point, Deal or No Deal, returns at 8:00PM ET.  There are some special things coming along with it for the premiere, like an updated set, new look for the models, a “new” text at home game, but most importantly the Million Dollar Mission, which adds a million dollar case to the game every time it’s not won in the previous game.  The contestant is starting with four today.  And I’d just be sure to watch in the next few days also, if I were you.  Just a friendly warning.

What makes it interesting is that NBC promoted the show a ton over the Olympics which had gigantic viewing audiences.  Deal fizzled out big time during the course of the Winter 2008 season.  Many people were calling it dead because of over saturation, but this happens every single season and it rebounds in the upcoming Fall.  But will it this season?  Especially with the syndicated version coming, are we nearing massive overkill from viewing, or a death from too many lousy gimmicks?  Deal will only be airing Mondays for the first few weeks of the Fall season and will expand once some show fails which knowing NBC won’t take too long.

Be sure to check it out and let us know what you think of the new season.  This will go in the show review page, so be as angry and objective as you want.  And just a warning: if you are not a fan of spoilers, I would turn off every second of the show that isn’t actual game footage.

You know, of all people to be an asshole about a website’s content, I should probably be the last. If Wordpress wasn’t simple, I’d be clueless. I can write and that’s about it. However, GSN’s website, especially the show pages, are in shambles. There’s pictures of the new British version of Pyramid instead of our current version, wrong dates and times for shows, and then we get to Lingo. This one tickled me; here’s the show’s description from GSN’s site: “Chuck and his Lady Luck Stacey keep the Lingo balls-a-bouncing as 2-person teams compete to guess a hidden word hinted at from letter clues.”  Confused about Stacey?  She was the show’s co-host about five years ago.  Not even remotely current.  They could really use a bit more organization and, you know, factual information.  They seem to spend more time deciding on a new design for their logo than fixing the pages.

Continuing our Weekend Replay of a preview of Who Wants to be a Millionaire?’s new lifelines which will be coming up on September 8th (check your local listings).  Replacing Fifty/Fifty is “Double Dip,” which is taken from ABC’s revival Super Millionaire.  In Double Dip, you can answer the question twice.  If the first answer you give is incorrect, you get a 2nd shot.  Be warned, if you confirm you want to use it, you cannot back out of the question.  You must play it.  Enjoy.

We’ve been writing about Who Wants to be a Millionaire? and a lot of its changes the past few weeks.  One thing we keep mentioning is the new set of lifelines, Double Dip and Ask the Expert from ABC’s short revival called Super Millionaire.  I’ve gotten quite a few emails and comments asking what exactly does the lifeline do, and I figured the best example is to just show you.  So enjoy a weekend of Super Millionaire clips.  During this weekend we’ll be showing you three videos of three different questions.  Here’s the half million dollar question. Note: Ask the Expert is just a one player version of the lifeline you will see below.

I’m about to give you a lot of opinions which conflict what I’ve written over and over in other articles during this post.  First off, let’s get the facts straight.  Bingo America, GSN’s hit interactive game show, is coming back.  People are reading way too much into its removal from the schedule.  GSN still gives away money to home viewers during the reruns.  No reason to continue doing this.  It’s why the show needs a larger episode order than 40, but I digress.  We know one change for sure, and that’s host Patrick Duffy is gone from the show.  Replacing him is, get ready, former Family Feud host Richard Karn.

And here comes the confusion.  I can actually see this working.  Let me get this out of the way and if Mr. Karn somehow reads this, I apologize but it’s just my opinion.  Richard was not a very good Feud host.  He was way too repetitive, not good with being funny off the top of his head, and was so cheery it gave viewers diabetes.  He’s moving to a show where he has no choice but to be repetitive, he has no time for improv, and he needs to be really excited and energetic.  I really think this is going to work well.  I liked former host Patrick Duffy and if he wants to host a more subdued game show, I’d love to see it.  But he was just too mellow and dull for the circus of the show.

England recently had a daytime variety show called Let Me Entertain You.  Basically it was a modern Gong Show.  A person stands on stage and tries to entertain the audience.  Audience members can hit a button to kick the act off, and when at least half hits the button, the act is gone.  Lasting one minute gets £100, two minutes is £200, and lasting 3 minutes wins £1,000.  Winners of each daily show come back for a weekly final.  It seems America’s getting their own version, as a pilot is being taped on the Jimmy Kimmel Live.  It’s a very entertaining show and I’d love to see it come over here.

We don’t write enough about Are You Smarter than a Fifth Grader? here.  Partially because I still am not a fan of the show.  Partially because nothing interesting ever happens on it.  However, FOX is attempting to change that by throwing in a lot of celebrities this season.  I mean a lot.  We have famed game show winners, supermodels, Nobel laureate, and more.  Because, you know, adding celebrities to a show usually works.

Right now it looks like ten celebrities have signed on.  Included in the list is supermodel Kathy Ireland, actor Dean Cain, musician Gene Simmons, boxer Sugar Ray Leonard, former fat person now out of a job personality Star Jones, actress Jennie Garth, astronaut Robert Gibson, zookeeper Jack Hanna, astrophysicist and Nobel laureate George Fitzgerald Smoot III (who has the snobbiest name I’ve ever heard in my life), and Jeopardy! champion Ken Jennings.  It’s at least five episodes of the 22 currently scheduled airings.  Honestly, it’ll probably be in the area of seven or eight episodes since they love to stretch stuff out.  Isn’t this stuff what killed Weakest Link and a lot of other shows which threw as many celebrity shows as they could?  I mean it’s nice that they are still giving the lowest scoring people on audition exams the ability to play the majority of a time.  But over a third of the episodes will be celebrities.  Isn’t it a bit much?

Are You Smarter than a Fifth Grader?’s new season kicks off on Friday, September 5 with a two hour episode featuring Kathy Ireland.

Good news for all our friends from England.  BBC One has picked up the rights to producer an original version of my favorite show of the year, Wipeout.  It’s said to debut sometime in 2009 from Endemol.  Unlike in America, though, this version will be taping in Argentina where many international versions seem to be taping.  We’ve been seeing a lot of game shows in general taping episodes or pilots in Argentina recently.  Probably because of the reduced cost there.

Wipeout is part of BBC One controller Jay Hunt’s plan to revamp the network by taking more risks and get new ideas.  I don’t think it’s that big of a risk, though.  Wipeout is good and entertaining enough to work anywhere.  Enjoy a best of video of episode one.