If I may....
In the event that GSN somehow sees fit to delete one of my latest posts because they think I hate them, I'd like for there to be a record of it somewhere. It contains a portion of Seth's post from earlier in this thread. It also has my response to it. I was responding to a new poster who did not like what GSN was doing on the programming side (again.....yes, I know we bitch about all day.......okay almost all day.....) Anyway, here's a copy of the post
Originally posted January 27, 2005 at 1:31 PM ET on the GSN boards:
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Welcome, ladieluck!!
You will find many friends on this board who share your view (I being one of them.)
Many of us have complained about the direction GSN took last year with all of the reality and casino programming. We believe that there should be more "traditional" game show programming on GSN (much like "Whammy" or "Russian Roulette" as examples).
The following excerpt is a post made by our own Seth Thrasher at another popular game show board. He posted an old post from ATGS concerning GSN's ratings from May, 2001. The post can be accessed here.
Here is Seth's response to it:
The average number of viewers, respective of both sets of data, is in the 100,000 mark, give or take a few millon. This means that if you assume the number given in the LV article (145,000) is the average number of viewers for GSN....GSN, in THREE YEARS, gaining almost 10 million households, and spending ungodly amounts of money on new classics, originals...a rebranding effort, multiple executive changes (New President, Two VP's of Programming, multiple other executive changes) since April 30, 2001, and so forth.....for 45,000-ish viewers.
My response to Seth's post:
GSN would be better off putting its' money back in game shows. It should be making more originals and more eps per run than what it has done.
I know a lot of other networks (namely Discovery) tend to do 13 show seasons for their shows. But there's two differences:
1 - Discovery and their kin don't constantly rerun their shows to death (on these boards, it's called "rerun abuse") They tend to be very timely, and will make enough to last a full year, if need be.
2 - Game shows are not the same kind of animal as what other networks put out. It requires a full commitment to the genre, one that GSN has lacked for a long time. You can't produce 65 eps and say done, and repeat 8 or 9 times then kill. Once the eps are through, the average GSN viewer will say "Hey, I just saw that three months ago! Are they rerunning already?", and not come back unless they know more shows are coming. And that's how GSN loses viewers in the rerun cycle. And GSN forgets how many viewers each show has because they only count the last cycle through. That was their justification for not renewing any of the 2002 originals. I've long maintained that USA did their originals right (most notably with the late 80's "Chain Reaction"). They ordered up 130 eps every year, played them from January to June, replayed them from July- December, and did it all over again (in CR's case, for five years.)
(sorry for the long post )
Once again, welcome to you.
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(you can also respond here with whatever thoughts you'd like.)
