“Wheel of Fortune” Crushes Summer Programming
Sony sent out an interesting press release recently. Wheel of Fortune, if you follow television ratings at all, has been crushing most of the summer programming so far. In all honesty, it crushes a lot of the fall programming as well. It’s gotten a 6.4 household ratings, which is only second to America’s Got talent (excluding the Olympics which didn’t start when the release came out), which got a 7.2. It’s averaging 46 million viewers for a week which is pretty staggering.
I’ve always wondered why Wheel hasn’t popped up in primetime television. With the way networks are enjoying putting these classic half hour game shows in primetime for an hour, I would have figured Wheel of Fortune would have been a no brainer seeing the amount of viewers it gets daily. I always thought they would save a million dollar end game for primetime, to be honest. Apparently we’re good in syndication for that now. Which leads to a question: do you think Wheel could do well in primetime?
One potential issue for Wheel is that, in most of the nation, it’s almost in primetime already. Most of the other shows in syndication that have some primetime overlap are at different times of the day in much of the nation. But Wheel and Jeopardy! are in the 7-8 block almost everywhere.
I would love to see some primetime specials (minus the celebrities. I saw one episode of the Celebrity Family Feud on NBC and it turned me off as a viewer) or even better yet I would love to see a tournament of champions. I haven’t seen one of those in a while and Wheel is the perfect format to do it with. Bring back the top players and have them duke it out. Who ever wins the tournament gets a $1,000,000.
I would like to see a primetime Wheel Tournament of Champions that could go like the Jeopardy TOC (as far as format). But, I don’t see that happening. It’s kind of a risk.
Also, I didn’t know that Wheel reruns were doing so well against everything else in summer programming! I thought the ratings would drop off a little.
I think Wheel could do very well in primetime. If anything, I think it might be better viewing in primetime than syndication, since it feels rushed right now; ideally, with primetime having less commercial time than syndication, more time would be devoted to gameplay.
The problem with a primetime Wheel is that Wheel of Fortune already airs (in the majority of markets anyway) in the Prime Time Access hour (7/6-8/7). The only way it can happen is if they air it on Saturday or Sunday Night. Although, IMHO, I could see it on Saturday Night on CBS back-to-back with Million Dollar Password. A TOC format isn’t a bad idea. The winner would win $1 million (I know they’ll do the $1 million thing next season, so, people, don’t chew me out on this one). Although I’m not surprised about the ratings, one would think that, during the summertime, popular shows (even Wheel and Jeopardy!) would suffer a little drop in the ratings.
I’ve thought about Wheel being in primetime for years now. Come on, truly now, look at the ratings over it’s 25 year syndie history. For most of the time it’s been in syndication, it’s ratings, when lined up against primetime programming, would’ve put it in the top 10 Nielsen households list every week, summer or no summer. In the late 80′s and early 90′s, it was getting 40 friggin million *yes, that’s 40,000,000* viewers EVERY episode. Over 200 million viewers every week is uh, kinda, good, yeah?
However, there are a few issues, the obvious one most people have brought up being that’s in prime-access already *though that didn’t stop Super Jeopardy nearly 20 years ago*, but the other being how you would distinguish a prime time version from a daily version.
A tournament would be next to torturous. How would you distinguish who gets an in and who doesn’t? You can’t do just 100k+ winners, as contestants on in the late 90′s when Wheel had players on only once, and had no 100k top prize, would be out of the running, along with the syndie’s first 6 years. You also have 16 years of the daytime version, which would need to be taken into consideration. A tourney would not be ideal, a primetime version would need to be self-contained.
Would you run it 5 days a week on a network *what did you say!?*? Once a week? Or, pull an NBC and start it off slow, than ramp it up to like 3 airings. 2nd, the show is already gimmick-laden as is, would a simple upping of dollar values *Friedman attempting 10k in R4 possibly again* be enough to make a primetime version “special enough”? 3rd, how would you handle the hosting job? Play it safe and try to get Pat and Vanna to sign on, or would you try to use it as a breeding ground for potential new hosts/hostesses? An issue with that is, if the show doesn’t do comparably well, the immediate blame will be directed towards the 2 presenters, when maybe it truly isn’t the case.
This is also why I was not entirely happy with WOF getting a million dollar top prize. That would’ve been something I’d expect would’ve been added, as well, if the show was gonna start a primetime version, not the “semi-classic” show. Now, how would you work the top prize on a primetime wheel? Make it a ten million dollar bonus? *shutters*
But here’s what I think is the bottom line. WOF is Sony TV’s most powerful property. The show is a money bandwagon, last time I checked, it makes Sony approximately $150 million a season, if that hasn’t already gone up to something like $200 million recently. The show might as well give Sony the license to print money. Sony, being a business first and foremost, would not, for obvious reasons, want ANYBODY else to get a hold of any potential “WOF” money, especially the networks, their prime programming competitor. Thus, Sony will have to be ones to recommend for WOF to go primetime, nobody else. The shows are, for the most part, so established with many of their times/channels/basic formats *and with Wheel, I do mean its very basics*, that Sony would not want to disrupt that which the shows already have established, for fear of losing some of the cashflow.
Could Wheel do it? Hell yes, and the ratings might be mind-blowing. Will it happen soon? It depends on Sony. CBS would be the most probable locale *distributed by CBS TV distribution, formerly Kingworld*. Do I personally want to see it?…
Pitch to me how you wanna work the show, and I’ll get back to you. It’s something you could work into a primetime must-tv event, or an absolute butchering of one of TV’s most popular shows… ever…
kinda like, what’s already been said, J! and wheel air at 8;30 and 9 (i think) here plus, it used to air on another channel at 5:00 and 5;30 (same eps.). I don’t think a primetime version would work as well becuase it would be overexposure and there’s no guarrantee that pat and Vanna would do it which I think would hurt, since they’re boith such icons of the show now.
Jeopardy might work as a “super Jeopardy” type tournament, this is actually what i think they should have done for the Ultimate T of C: do a seperate series, instead of screwing over that guy that had to wait 4 months to continue as a champion. and no byes, instead 144 players, which would reduce to 48 winners after 1 round, the 16 winners plus 2 wildcards go to round 3, the 6 winners of that round move on, the 2 winners in the next round go automatically to the final round, the 3rd spot is decided with a 4-player game involving the losing contestants of that round, the winner goes to the final, but starts game 1 of the finals at -$5,000. prize money would be exactly the same.
I remember when in the 80s and early 90s Wheel of Fortune was on in the daytime and the nighttime, so I would not be surprised if I see another daytime run for the 21st century.
As far as the $1,000,000 goes, it is a good idea for the show and a long time coming. However, it is going to be damnly impossible to win the million dollars, but it should be exciting to watch.
I think Wheel could do well as a primetime half-hour, but I’d be interested in a sort of “retro” version; that is, one that re-introduced shopping for prizes. Yes, that slows down the show, but it did have people talking. (Uh, yeah, Pat, I’ll take the ceramic dog for $99.) Might be good for nostalgia if nothing else.
I do agree, Wheelloon. Wheel of Fortune has been Sony’s francise show since they’ve acquired it from the late Merv Griffin in the late ’80s. Yes, it didn’t stop Super Jeopardy, however, it aired on Saturday Nights and, unlike Wheel of Fortune, many stations didn’t air Jeopardy on weekends (some to this day still don’t). The only way, as I posted earlier, that a prime time Wheel would work is if they air it on Saturday Night (which, honestly, other than Fox which airs Cops and AMW, no other network airs any programming other than either movies or encores of popular shows) on CBS.
The reason for that, devares, is that TV ratings for Saturday nights are piss-poor, thus, why you get Fox’s police-block and movies on the networks. If the only time Wheel would have to air in primetime is Saturday, they shouldn’t, wouldn’t, (and won’t) bother going through with it. The same applies for DAYTIME TV. Currently, TPIR gets about half of Wheel’s ratings, and it’s near the top of the daytime TV list, and has been for some time. You won’t see WOF popping up on either.
As for Super J!, also remember this. Monopoly, also produced by Griffin, was its pairing for the full hour on Saturdays, and Monopoly was picked up for a trial by ABC to see if it would work for syndication. To get a full-hour out of it, ABC needed to pair it something, which is how J!, another Griffin property, got put there, in the Super form. So while it WAS on in primetime, it was no more than a fill-in for a slot that ABC needed to fill, also to hopefully boost Monopoly’s ratings a bit *which it didn’t*.
As for Sony, Merv sold his company to Coke in the late 80′s, but his production company (still under his name) didn’t let go of the show until 1994. Sony wasn’t involved until a little later, and had no bearing on Super J!.
The fact that they’ve changed the returning-player status so many times over the years makes a Tournament of Champions a non-starter.
I think you should look at the Game Show Marathon’s version of Press Your Luck as how the show could best work in prime time. Assuming a half-hour show, have three or four “regular” puzzles with wheel values roughly corresponding to the 90′s values with an extra 0. (If you have toss-up puzzles at all, limit them to one before the first regular puzzle and one before the fourth.) Don’t throw in anything after the puzzle: no “where am I”, “clue”, etc.
Thanks for the correction, wheelloon. I forgot that Merv Griffin sold his company to Coca Cola, which, at the time, owned Columbia Pictures for $250 million. Sony took over in 1989 when Coca Cola sold all its entertainment assets and got out of the business.
I could see Wheel going retro with shopping and for one hour. Other than that, there’s really nothing whiz-bang about Wheel going primetime.
Sometimes you can milk a money-making cow a bit too much, and that is, I think, what would happen with a prime-time Wheel. Not that any company could be faulted for trying to cash in, but there probably isn’t a pressing need for Sony to shop a network version of Wheel around.
As for a daytime network version: not likely unless or until soaps start dying off and then only if the networks (a) keep the hours and don’t give them back and (b) don’t feel they can do better in those slots with repurposed primetime shows (swinging back to the days when shows like All in the Family were on network daytime) or talk/lifestyle shows.
The Price is Right is a profitable last gasp of what appears to be a dead genre otherwise–network daytime games. Maybe they can come back the way prime time games did, but you shouldn’t bet on it.