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Alternate Timeline: Jack Barry's heart attack is not fatal
snowpeck:
TJW was on a slow decline anyway. The writing was on the wall even before Barry's death.
Some numbers from May 1984 in Variety shows it was only being seen in 62 markets, compared to 110 for Wheel, 139 for Feud and even 90 for TTD. As far as ratings, TJW was pulling in a 4.8 compared to Wheel's massive 12.3, Feud's 9.6 and TTD's 5.7.
Adam Nedeff:
Late to the party but rather than use Wiki as a definitive source, I wanted to step in and say I interviewed two Joker staffers, Allen Koss and Mark Maxwell-Smith, for Quizmaster and both of them backed up the story that Jack was planning on retiring and passing the torch to Jim Peck to start the new season.
TLEberle:
(I was going to mention that I'm on friendly terms with someone who wrote a book about it, but Adam's here.)
The fact that Jack retires from hosting doesn't mean that the company closes down or that they stop pumping out new formats, I still think that they probably wait out the glut in 1985 and '86 and come back with other ideas later on.
BrandonFG:
While we're on the subject, something I've wondered for a while was why TJW and TTD 90 were produced/distributed by different companies. Joker reverted to being a Jack Barry Production, in association with Kline and Friends, dist. by Orbis. Meanwhile Tic Tac remained a B&E Production, but dist. by ITC. Was it a rights issue, or was Dan Enright simply not interested in taking on both shows?
aaron sica:
Thank you, Adam, for turning legend into fact which also, in turn, makes this thread null and void. :) Extra thanks to the BF-G for taking it in a new, interesting direction.
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