“Deal or No Deal”, “Fifth Grader”, and “Lyrics” Not Returning Fall 2009

It looks like this cycle of primetime game shows is over because of, yet again among a few things, god awful scheduling by the networks.  NBC’s Deal or No Deal and FOX’s Are You Smarter Than a Fifth Grader? and Don’t Forget the Lyrics will not be coming back Fall 2009 and, simply put, they are almost positively canceled.  No official word has been given but you don’t need official word in these cases.  They are dying in the ratings, audiences are going away fast, and it’s constantly shuffled and removed.  They are gone.

Deal or No Deal should be no shock.   The ratings for the three week trial the past few Mondays have been beyond terrible.  They’ve been pretty bad all season.  Originally I placed blame on the fact that this season NBC decided to remove it from its normal Monday slot and put it on Friday.  It went back to Monday and has done horrible.  Far worse than ever before.  To me it was just a giant mix of NBC abusing the hell out of it and the constant gimmicks.  We’re finally getting back to normal, regular shows but it’s too late.  The damage was done.  The good news is that the daytime version of Deal will be back September 2009, and it’s far better than the NBC version ever was.  Moving to Connecticut to save budget may be a great thing for it, as if it can keep at its current rating level we may see it for a while.  So at least something good came of NBC’s god awful primetime version: we got the good daytime version.

Are You Smarter Than a Fifth Grader and Don’t Forget the Lyrics never really did much for me.  They were both essentially Millionaire ripoffs (Millionaire for Dumbasses and Music Millionaire, respectively) that didn’t try to change it up a bit (1 VS 100).  But fans of Fifth Grader will be happy to know the show will be on in the daytime for a syndicated run starting September 2009.  We’ll see how long it can last there.  Even beyond my bias against the show I really don’t think that long since Millionaire is already running, but I could be wrong; it’s not that rare.  Don’t Forget the Lyrics just seems to be gone for good and not showing up anywhere again.  Scheduling abuse doesn’t seem to be the issue for those two.  They weren’t plastered everywhere.  Moving the shows from their successful Thursday time slots to a Friday one was an awful move, but FOX doesn’t seem to be hurting or missing them at all.  People just seemed to get tired of the formats after a bit, too.

That’s really the basic principle, to me, of why all these primetime game shows go.  People are getting tired of the formats and you move on.  The issue is the production companies and networks tweak the formats like crazy and change it to bring those people back, but they don’t come back and you lose what loyal viewers you had in the first place.  We saw that with primetime Deal and we see in daytime Deal how sticking with something that works keeps your loyal viewers.  I’m sure more primetime games will come soon.  To look at it positively as well, this new run of primetime game shows brought in some new syndicated game shows; something that hasn’t happened in a long long time.  This stuff is always in a cycle.  Wait a few years.  We’ll get another big quiz format and they’ll all explode again.  We’ve already taken shows from the British and the Dutch.  Let’s wait see who’s next.