The Game Show Forum > The Big Board
Have Game Shows Jumped the Shark?
Dbacksfan12:
[quote name=\'chris319\' date=\'Oct 21 2003, 04:15 PM\'] . The question being posed here is: When and in what ways have modern game shows "jumped the shark"? If you need a definition of jumping the shark, see here:
http://www.jumptheshark.com/
[/quote]
I think gameshows "jumped the shark" after NBC cancelled their last daytime effort; I believe Caesar's Challenge. Then we went through a dead period of gameshows, and when they resurfaced in about 1998; we were left with what we have now.
Jimmy Owen:
"The Chamber" and "The Chair."
clemon79:
We haven't begun to see "bad" yet, folks.
Remember, Chuck Barris said "The ultimate game show would be one in which the losing contestant were killed." I haven't seen a thing about our society to indicate to me that we're not still slowly but surely heading to that point.
(At the same time, I'm getting myself caught up in the easy mistake of what the rest of the world does, which is totally misinterpreting the ACTUAL meaning of the "jumping the shark" concept. If I had to pick the ultimate apex, the point where I knew it could only go downhill, I'd say it would be the Millionaire / Twenty-One / Greed / Winning Lines era, when they tossed out 250 and 500 large like it was a handful of Tootsie Rolls. I like Don's idea of the death of Ceasar's Challenge, and certainly game shows haven't gotten BETTER, but I think the breaking of the million-dollar barrier (discounting $1MCOAL as a freak of nature) was the real apex.)
chris319:
Any game show can give away a million dollars but that doesn't make a bad game good. I have an idea for "Million-Dollar Mindreaders". Any takers?
My reference to Radio Shack synthesizer music involved a show with a music package so bad, they eventually went back to the original musical "score".
chris319:
--- Quote ---if we had the exact same conversation thirty years ago, we'd be complaining about the crappy synthesized theme to Concentration, the ugly set to Password, the annoying audience of The Price is Right, the gimmickry of The $10,000 Pyramid, and the format slaughtering of Match Game 73.
--- End quote ---
I was around 30 years ago and never heard any such complaints, other than from people who don't like anything about game shows to begin with.
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