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Alternate realities when it comes to game shows

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chris319:

--- Quote from: Blanquepage on June 20, 2023, 11:38:51 AM ---I definitely believe Break the Bank would've had a decent daytime run had it not been for that soap expansion.
--- End quote ---

I think BTB deserved better than it got, but with nine celebs it must have been a relatively expensive show to do.

Tic Tac Dough, Jeopardy! (1978), Double Dare, Trivia Trap and even Whew! all flopped in daytime. TTD and J! did a lot better in prime access. I think a hard Q&A quiz like Twenty One would have flopped in daytime as well. Unrigged, Twenty One was a dull show by Dan Enright's own account, c.f. the PBS doc, and the 2000 prime-time version didn't set the world on fire. Blockbusters had some success in daytime but it had the game of hex and contestants were given the benefit of the initial letter of the answer. PYL had multiple-choice Q&A and the material didn't exactly test the intellect.

When I mull over game show formats I eschew strictly Q&A formats, figuring J! has a lock on that and audiences may burn out on Q&A. Jay Wolpert gets an "A" for effort in exploring fresh formats but his shows were a little too "out there".

Joe Mello:
To further underline the current-ness of this topic, I've been led to wonder recently what happened were there no Writers Strikes. I don't think Temptation would've been presented as it was if at all if the previous strike hadn't happened (MNTV probably lives a bit longer as a channel w/ original programming too). The recent ESPN documentary also heavily implies that American Gladiators only made it to air because of a strike.

What a different world we could live in if companies properly compensated their workforce.

BrandonFG:
Another two that cross my mind occasionally. I might be getting a little creative here. :P

Ever since the late-70s, Merv wanted a syndicated version of Wheel. IIRC, he almost got 20th Century Fox to distribute the show in 1980, and I'm guessing it would've been a 20CF companion to Dance Fever. That being said, I don't think it becomes the massive hit it became in '83 and I predict it gets the axe around the same time as Dance Fever.

In this alternate universe I see it getting a short-lived reboot in the mid-90s, then another one in the late-90s/early-2000s that runs to this day. Since evening Wheel doesn't give Feud a run for the money, Dawson goes a couple more years on syndicated Feud and passes off the torch to Ray Combs in '88. The ABC version still goes off the air in '85. Oh, and since Wheel went off the air around '87 Pat Sajak gets a CBS gig, but in 1993. Letterman replaces Carson in '92 and Jay Leno gets something in syndication.

The other one is Dean Goss's LMAD continuing into '86, and doing just well enough to make it to '87-'88 before finally getting canceled.

mmb5:

--- Quote from: aaron sica on June 20, 2023, 10:37:23 AM ---Along those same lines, even though it's not one of the syndicated fall 1990 games, that comment caused me to wonder what would have happened if Ross Shafer's comment on the last MG90 about "another channel, another time" had come to pass. It's rumored that was CBS. If that were the case, I could see the "Designing Women" reruns being taken off to make room.

--- End quote ---
I asked Bob Boden if there was anything in the works for MG90 post-cancellation.  He said there were no plans.

SamJ93:
I think the major lynchpin for us would have to be if Chief Justice Earl Warren had ruled the opposite way in 1954, finding that "giveaway shows" constituted gambling and were therefore not allowed on the airwaves.
Given the trajectory of media and society, it seems almost inevitable that they would've been allowed on the air at some point anyway. But when would that have happened? How would long-running favorites like TPiR and Wheel have developed--if they even existed at all? Would the scandals still have occurred at some point?

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