Has anyone else been extremely disappointed with this year’s syndicated offerings? They are both severely lacking, especially Temptation, and if we see any last a season, let alone past January, I’ll be amazed. Luckily next season we might have a very interesting syndication front. Three popular game shows are being worked out for syndication, one already cleared in 50% of the country. The shows: Deal or No Deal, Are You Smarter Than a Fifth Grader?, and Power of 10.

Daytime Deal or No Deal is old news, but a few new items have poured in. Right now they are committing to 32 weeks of the show and possibly up to 36. $250,000 is going to be the top prize and, good news, contestants are going to be holding the cases. There are only going to be three models as of now and future contestants will be holding the other cases. How many cases? Who knows. Might we suggest 22? There’s no way you can fit a meaningful 26 case game in 20 minutes, not including talking. Each contestant will have the half hour to themselves meaning games will be a bit more predictable. However, I’ll gladly take a predictable ending instead of a far-too-long, overly gimmicked one. This is one show I see being much better in daytime.

The other show I see being better is Are You Smarter Than a Fifth Grader?. Yeah, no one’s won the million yet. However, the show has never been a million dollar prime time show. I think one of our regular readers, David Howell, said it best, that it’s like a Comedy Central show shoved in prime time. Speed up the game play and knock the prize down to $100,000. I think the game will be actually enjoyable and not as nauseatingly dramatic. The only show I worry about is Power of 10, but in a good way. It’s no secret that I’m a huge fan of the show, and I think a majority of the readers here are. However, the easy syndication fix to the budget is dividing the prizes by ten. We had an overwhelming amount of $1,000 and $10,000 winners. Transfer this to daytime and that’s a lot of $100 and $1,000 winners which just seems cheap. I’m all for seeing the show as much as possible, but I’d need to see how they are going to the budget first. If they can somehow be brave enough to keep it as a $10,000,000 show in prime time, I’ll be completely amazed. A majority of the winners were within budget for daytime shows. If Sony has the guts, they could do it. Do they? We’ll see. At least it’s better than Sony’s syndication offerings of last year.