A Closer Look at GSN’s 2009 Game Show Awards

One thing that’s been exciting a lot of game show fans recently has been GSN’s announcement of the 2009 Game Show Awards, taking place in Los Angeles in May 16th and airing June 6th at 8:00PM ET.  You can vote for the awards by clicking the logo to the left or just by clicking here as well.  We now at least know the host is Howie Mandel who’s packing up for Connecticut soon, and we know the basic workings.  I wanted to get a closer look, though.  Kelly Goode, the head of programming at GSN, sat down with me for a bit to discuss how things are going with the awards, the difficulty of putting on the show, and the fan’s response.

Many game show fans feel this award show is a long-time coming for the genre.  ”When I got here this had already been discussed,”  she said.  ”It seems among the things people were talking about doing, let’s look into this right away, because as you said this is long overdue.  We wanted to have some of the traditional categories that some would expect…but in having some of the other categories that are a little more tongue in cheek but all are very memorable about game shows.”

Awards shows usually carry the suspense of who’s going to get nominated or left out. Kelly said there was lots of it at GSN.  ”With any kind of awards show there’s some speculation.  There’s a passion of people that say, “How could they not include X, Y, or Z,” or , “Why would you include X, Y, or Z,” in a category, but we hope this is the first in an enduring franchise for us  so we hope we can go forward in the future and include other favorites that we’re missing this go-around.”

“Fans of the show are passionate but it’s a big tent.  Our hope is that we can get something the passionate fans can really love and enjoy but some of the people who come in and out or enjoy a few particular show, that they can enjoy too.  We would hope to have something that would appeal to people across the board.”

One interesting question I had was how did the nominees get determined, since no one really knows right now. I wanted to know about how they determined the three special honorees (Mark Goodson, Monty Hall, and Bob Barker) as well.  ”We had a panel of experts that included some internal and a couple of external people to come up with the categories.”

“This was one of our biggest discussions internally.  We wanted to have a mix of people and giving the posthumas one to Mark Goodson.  We talked about whether or not we wanted to honor producers at all, but it’s important to honor producers here.  It’s a nod to the passionate fans because it’s easy just to hosts/performers, but it’s important to us to do these honors.”

It looks to be an interesting, fun awards show, and hopefully this excited some more of you. Again, if you have not voted for the awards yet, click the awards logo above to do so or click here. GSN’s 2009 Game Show Awards hosted by Howie Mandel will air June 6th at 8:00PM ET and be rerun throughout the weekend.

One more little tidbit that was nice to hear for you all. GSN does scan this site, and they do read your comments and take them into consideration. Kelly brought up one specific comment about the Spiegel catelogue during our talk, so keep commenting because they listen. We had a discussion about Newlywed Game and the editing which caused a lot of good material to be left on the floor for the end game, so they do hear you. You just have to speak up.