Wipeout wipes out

Zap2It offers a frothy chat with Jill Wagner. Seems that nobody knows her except as the Mercury girl or the Wipeout girl.

Of course, she wasn't the Wipeout girl for a while. The producers tried Vanessa Lachey for a season. That didn't help the numbers, so Jill is back. Except she isn't helping the numbers much, either. The latest installment of the big balls epic on Thursday May 16 earned the lowest 18-49 rating ever for the series. A paltry 1.0 rating with 3.8 million total viewers.

Yes, the show ran against tough competition: season finales for Big Bang Theory and American Idol. But the ratings have generally been dismal throughout Wipeout's new season. The show is getting tired, and switching Wipeout girls doesn't look like the answer.

The truly dismal reality may be that no answer exists. Nothing lasts forever (he said sententiously) and the show has enjoyed a nice long run. You can only bounce so many contestants off so many obstacles before viewers look elsewhere.

We are the champions

After grumping so much about Jeopardy's endless tournaments and stunts, I'm blogging about the show's college champ. This may seem hypocritical, and in fact it is hypocritical. But what can I do? This is a blog for game show news. And the biggest news today is Georgetown's Jim Coury copping a hundred grand as Jeopardy's college tournament winner.

All grumpiness aside, congrats to Jim. It's tough enough to win one time on Jeopardy, much less a tournament against handpicked college smarty-pants. Jim's been dreaming of Jeopardy glory for a while. He tried to qualify for the show's kids tournament when he was ten years old. It's always nice to see a dream come true, as even this cynical blogger will admit.

An weird sidenote to this year's tournament is a page of "hotties" among the contestants. Jeopardy never exactly struck me as the show for eye candy. But somebody out there apparently disagrees.

Monopolizing your attention

TNT is developing a show based on Monopoly, that fun game which takes forever to play and usually leaves you bankrupt. The project sounds more like a reality bitchfest than a game show, to be honest.

But once upon a time - 1990, to be exact - Merv Griffin tried to turn the Parker Brothers chestnut into a genuine game show, with contestants and a host and even eggcrate displays. His effort was wasted, as the show expired in three days (slight exaggeration). YouTube offers some of the remnants.

Though the set featured an excruciatingly faithful reproduction of the Monopoly board, the actual gameplay didn't resemble the board game all that much. Instead, the show was a rather routine quizzer/word game. A former Jeopardy contestant named Mike Reilly hosted as blandly as possible.

Don't know what TNT's version will look like, if it ever gets to air. But I doubt it will be as game show-y as the 1990 half-hour.

Chatter ends

GSN has announced that they're closing down their Internet board.

The moderator cites technical difficulties, whatever that means. A while back she warned about closing down the board, and the warning has now turned real. Have to admit I don't post there as much as I used to. This blog absorbs most of my game show blatherings nowadays. But I had a lot of fun on the board over the years.

Like so much of the game show Interwebs, the board leaned heavily traditionalist. Many posters grew misty-eyed remembering the heyday of Bill Cullen, eggcrate displays, and a year's supply of Turtle Wax. Much of the board would erupt in joy whenever GSN added an old show to the schedule, and howl in disapproval whenever the network tried something new, unless it was a close relative of an old show. A fond dream of many posters was a GSN Classic spinoff network, which would be a "museum of game shows," to use GSN President David Goldhill's memorable phrase.

The dream never happened and probably never will happen. And now the GSN board itself is passing on to the great Internet Archive in the sky (or the cloud). Hail and farewell.

UPDATE: The moderator says some kind of GSN board will eventually return. I'll believe it when I see it.

Ratings: syndies don't so much

There was very little movement for syndicated game shows in the week of April 29-May 5. In fact, most of the shows didn't budge at all. But I do the weekly summary no matter what. This is a full-service game show blog. TVNewsCheck brings the news, if you can call it that...

Wheel of Fortune 6.5 - flat
Jeopardy 6.0 - up a tick to creep closer to the soulmate
Family Feud 4.6 - flat
Millionaire 2.3 - down a tick
Baggage 1.1 - flat, as Jerry closes out a blah week

The top four made the list at TV by the Numbers. Their viewership averages: Wheel of Fortune 9.9 million (weekend repeat 4.9 million), Jeopardy 9.0 million, Family Feud 6.9 million, Millionaire 3.2 million. Even in a bland week, three of the top six syndies in total viewers were game shows.

GSN continues its pleasant ratings roll. TVNewser reports that the network averaged 421K/297K viewers prime time/total day for the week of May 6-12, ranking 37th and 36th in the windows. These are some of the best averages the network has ever produced.

A reminder

As a faux tweet noted, Joyce Brothers has died at age 85. Her sometimes ubiquitous media presence started with a game show, of course. She ran the table on $64,000 Question by knowing every last fact about the sweet science of boxing.

In Joyce's case, the money was apparently earned fair and square. But not everything on $64,000 Question was on the up and up, as the nation would soon discover. Although not completely fixed, the show became a victim of the rigging scandals that erupted in the late 1950s.

Those scandals are now slipping out of living memory, as the participants pass away. But the effects certainly live on. Standards and Practices, or whatever they call themselves nowadays, keep a sharp eye on every game show to make sure that no scent of rigging attaches. Even a whiff of rumor is enough to torpedo a game show, as the producers of the abortive Our Little Genius found out.

It's all for the best, I guess. In an imperfect world there will always be allegations of shady practices on game shows, not to mention every other human endeavor. But at least game show producers have a powerful motive to keep the shows honest.

Old mornings

In 1967 I was a callow fifteen-year-old. Aren't all fifteen-year-olds callow?

Whatever my condition, NBC was running a lot of game shows in the morning. This was back when NBC was a major network instead of an industry joke. Rambling around the game show Interwebs today, I came across this promo for the Peacock Net's 1967 morning gamers.

It's funny to see the Warholish multiple images of the gentlemen who hosted the (now) classic shows. Hard to believe that Andy could influence a commercial network's promos, but he definitely left a mark.

A couple of the shows in the promo have vanished without a literal trace: Snap Judgment and Eye Guess. The wipe monster got 'em, though a few bits and pieces of Bill Cullen's show somehow endured. Actually, almost all these NBC episodes got wiped, but at least Concentration, Hollywood Squares and Jeopardy spawned later versions that survived.

It's also funny to see the older-is-better comments about the promo on YouTube. As I've observed before, nostalgia is a powerful force.