The Game Show Forum
The Game Show Forum => Game Show Channels & Networks => Topic started by: SwohS Emag on November 22, 2011, 12:52:01 PM
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Link:
http://www.thefutoncritic.com/news/2011/11/22/gsn-game-show-network-acquires-exclusive-off-network-rights-to-abcs-dancing-with-the-stars-296404/20111122gsn01/
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Why not the first three?
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I know there are some of us who have some of the shows and champions committed to memory on shows GSN has run into the ground, but I never understood the attraction of watching one of these elimination-type shows in reruns. You know who the eventual champion is going to be..What's the fun in that?
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I know there are some of us who have some of the shows and champions committed to memory on shows GSN has run into the ground, but I never understood the attraction of watching one of these elimination-type shows in reruns. You know who the eventual champion is going to be..What's the fun in that?
Well, in the case of DWTS, it's a performance show, right? Maybe you want to see the more memorable (for good or ill) performances.
I also think you are overestimating the average TV audience, many of whom weren't watching the show at the time, and as such DON'T know who might have won a given season.
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I also think you are overestimating the average TV audience, many of whom weren't watching the show at the time, and as such DON'T know who might have won a given season.
Perhaps I am....How many of those average people would go online and find out who won and ruin it for themselves?
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It will probably be like The Amazing Race. The first cycle will probably do alright because people will watch that didn't watch the earlier seasons, but any repeats after that will have a ratings drop.
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How many of those average people would go online and find out who won and ruin it for themselves?
How much of DWTS's target audience even knows how to GET to Wikipedia to find out?
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I'll admit, I started watching the show regularly last season. Yes, I have looked at the list of winners. Would I want to watch the reruns? Probably every now and then.
I'm a tad surprised at the "let's jump on GSN for making a bad decision" bandwagon sometimes. There are times it may be warranted. I don't know which way this will go for them, but at least it's a true competition and not other reality dreck.
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Ovation airs So You Think You Can Dance reruns. As in, they run them for what seems like 24/7 from Friday-Monday, or at least they did some time ago. My wife started watching that show this year and has tuned into the Ovation reruns to see routines from past seasons. SYTYCD brings back all-stars as well and she says that looks for the all-stars when they were past contestants.
All this to say: there is some merit on airing these reruns. More "show" than "game," but the time for that argument has come and gone.
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My take on this is that GSN must have forgotten about "The Amazing Race" fiasco a few years back.
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Much different TV landscape now than when they picked up TAR. I see a channel looking for recognizable HD product and stumbling across an opportunity that fit that need well and is sorta on-topic to boot.
I wonder if it's expected to be their weekend marathon show to replace poker?
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I wonder how they will schedule/format the show, and if it will be edited down at all. The show has always had varied runtimes, between the performance and results shows... anywhere from one hour to two hours, with many episodes falling inbetween the two. Will it even be structured as performance/results shows or will they somehow combine it all into one?
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Ovation airs So You Think You Can Dance reruns. As in, they run them for what seems like 24/7 from Friday-Monday, or at least they did some time ago. My wife started watching that show this year and has tuned into the Ovation reruns to see routines from past seasons. SYTYCD brings back all-stars as well and she says that looks for the all-stars when they were past contestants.
How is she on recognizing the SYTYCD finalists that have appeared on Glee? (In the current storyline, the school's "other show choir", The TroubleTones, has Comfort Fedoke and Jaimie Goodwin - excuse me, "Season 4's Comfort and Season 3's Jaimie" (seriously, the only former contestant referred to by first and last name is Chelsea Hightower, and I have a feeling it's because the producers of Dancing With The Stars made it a condition for them even allowing her to appear as an All-Star last season) as two of the nameless (and uncredited) background singers (although they usually have the dancers just lip-sync to unshown, and equally uncredited, backup singers).)
My take on this is that GSN must have forgotten about "The Amazing Race" fiasco a few years back.
The difference:
DWTS = celebrities
TAR = "Who's that?" (Seriously, name anybody who has been on TAR who wasn't already famous before their appearance)
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(Seriously, name anybody who has been on TAR who wasn't already famous before their appearance)
Mirna & Schmirna. What do I win?
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(Seriously, name anybody who has been on TAR who wasn't already famous before their appearance)
Mirna & Schmirna. What do I win?
Another beer! No, wait, that's Drink the Beer (as seen on Family Guy).
Anyway, you sort of prove my point; you are not alone in not being able to remember most reality show contestants' last names. (It doesn't help them much in that, except for American Idol and America's Got Talent, pretty much none of them use contestants' last names. Even "normal" game shows like Lingo seem to be on a "first name only basis.")
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Anyway, you sort of prove my point; you are not alone in not being able to remember most reality show contestants' last names.
In this case, it doesn't matter what their last names are (The Rock approves), but I sure as hell remember who they are, last name or no.
Two, you didn't say anything about last names in the first place, so I fail to see where you can claim I've proven any point at all.
Three, how's the Perfesser?
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Given the "romance" kick GSN has been on (TNG, Baggage, Love Triangle), I'm surprised they didn't pick up "The Bachelor/ette" from ABC . . . wait, let me not give them ideas. With this acquisition, Tom Bergeron, Shandi Finnessey and John O'Hurley will be back on GSN (sort of). I suspect there will be the usual peak curiosity, then declining ratings with endless reruns.
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Given the "romance" kick GSN has been on (TNG, Baggage, Love Triangle), I'm surprised they didn't pick up "The Bachelor/ette" from ABC . . . wait, let me not give them ideas. With this acquisition, Tom Bergeron, Shandi Finnessey and John O'Hurley will be back on GSN (sort of). I suspect there will be the usual peak curiosity, then declining ratings with endless reruns.
Was O'Hurley on after Season 1 (or that "rematch" they had when so many people complained about the S1 result)?
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IIRC, O'Hurley and Mario Lopez had a "dance off" that was quite controversial. I believe O'Hurley got the Family Feud job because of his appearance on DWTS. He was hot at the time.
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IIRC, O'Hurley and Mario Lopez had a "dance off" that was quite controversial. I believe O'Hurley got the Family Feud job because of his appearance on DWTS. He was hot at the time.
"The version I heard was," in Season 1, there was no "results show" each week; what they did was, each week, they ranked the dancers 1-2-3-4... by the judges' scores, and 1-2-3-4... by the prevoius week's viewer vote, and combined the two, with any ties broken by the viewer vote. When it came down to the last two, this meant that the final round of dancing meant nothing, as the viewer vote from the previous week automatically determined the winner (either it matched the judges' vote, or it was 1-2 against 2-1); the consensus was that O'Hurley did the better dancing in the final, but since Lopez was ahead of him in the "final 3" viewer vote, she won. They had a "dance-off," which he won, but then the argument started over whether it really meant anything, and would he qualify if they ever had a "tournament of champions" of some sort.
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Given the "romance" kick GSN has been on (TNG, Baggage, Love Triangle), I'm surprised they didn't pick up "The Bachelor/ette" from ABC . . . wait, let me not give them ideas.
I have this baaaaaaaaaaaaaad feeling you're not saying anything they're not already thinking of.
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Are they freaking bananas? Ten straight hours of it Friday and Saturday nights and another 5 hours on Sunday afternoon?!?
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Are they freaking bananas? Ten straight hours of it Friday and Saturday nights and another 5 hours on Sunday afternoon?!?
This IS coming from the network that decided to burn off 7 seasons of The Amazing Race over the course of 3 months. You expect them to make sane programming decisions? :P
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I'll never forget the first time GSN branched out with GSN Video Games. That was in 2003, when GSN was still watchable to me.
What a terrible year for television 2004 was, looking back on it now. The good Game Show Network and TechTV were gone forever during the Spring of that year.
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I'll never forget the first time GSN branched out with GSN Video Games.
At least the hostess of the block was cute. (Can't think of her name)
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I'll never forget the first time GSN branched out with GSN Video Games.
At least the hostess of the block was cute. (Can't think of her name)
Carmen Nicole (http://"http://ia.media-imdb.com/images/M/MV5BMTk5NTc4OTA3MV5BMl5BanBnXkFtZTcwNDMxNTY3Ng@@._V1._SX512_SY640_.jpg").
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I don't know if it was answered, but BBC America has the rights to Series 1-3.
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The first days ratings are in for it, and it didn't do Great. The top rated episode finished at number 17 with 325,000, just below a 10:30am airing of The $100,000 Pyramid. All of the other airings were way down the list.
http://thevoiceoftv.com/nielsen-tv-ratings/gsn-ratings-january-16-22-2012/
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Whoever decided upon this lease clearly wasn't aware of one vital thing: Reality competitions just do *not* perform well in reruns.
I recall that Amazing Race, a *far* more interesting show with I think a substantially more re-watchable format, could only pull decent mediocre numbers it's first cycle before falling *hard*. As a general rule of thumb, when you're replaced by 50+ year old reruns of game shows in B&W (WML/IGAS) that only average around 100K viewers, in a time slot with painfully low expectations, before your lease even expires: your ratings are hysterically bad.
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The only competitive reality show that's done decently in cable reruns is to my knowledge Fear Factor- which for the most part is self-contained episodes. I don't know how Wipeout reruns are doing on TruTv, but that might also be an exception.
GSN threw a lot of money to get these reruns, and it looks like they missed again. Maybe they need to work on, you know, some original programming?
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GSN threw a lot of money to get these reruns, and it looks like they missed again. Maybe they need to work on, you know, some original programming?
Alternately, they could pick up. you know, some game shows.
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GSN threw a lot of money to get these reruns, and it looks like they missed again. Maybe they need to work on, you know, some original programming?
Alternately, they could pick up. you know, some game shows.
"But those skew OLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLD....EWWWWWW!"
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"But those skew OLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLD....EWWWWWW!"
Looking at their current bottom line, they're really not in a position to make that argument.
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Looking at their current bottom line, they're really not in a position to make that argument.
It's odd what arguments networks can make with a straight face. In the latest TV critics bash, Current TV made a presentation where they bragged about how they have the youngest skewing audience among the cable news networks. While that sounds like a cool bragging point, the simple fact is that any of the other networks (even MSNBC) deliver far more of those sought-after viewers, they're just bundled in a MUCH larger audience. Any given airing of Countdown gets around 50,000 viewers, and that's the network's top show by far.
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Any given airing of Countdown gets around 50,000 viewers, and that's the network's top show by far.
By comparison, the lowest-rated show on GSN's entire schedule for the most recent week posted was the 3:30a late-Monday airing of Card Sharks with Jim Perry with 85,000.
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325,000 viewers for a GSN program is bad?
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325,000 viewers for a GSN program is bad?
When they likely spent a good chunk of change to acquire it for its first series of off-network repeats and it is getting ratings similar to or less than repeats of shows that have went around the network 20 times by now (and in one instance, is over 20 years older), yeah. It's not that good. It's been promoted in many different outlets and they've even bought 10 or 15 seconds of ad time on Wheel and Jeopardy to promote it. I'm guessing they didn't expect Dick Clark to beat out Julianne Hough.
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325,000 viewers for a GSN program is bad?
When they likely spent a good chunk of change to acquire it for its first series of off-network repeats and it is getting ratings similar to or less than repeats of shows that have went around the network 20 times by now (and in one instance, is over 20 years older), yeah. It's not that good. It's been promoted in many different outlets and they've even bought 10 or 15 seconds of ad time on Wheel and Jeopardy to promote it. I'm guessing they didn't expect Dick Clark to beat out Julianne Hough.
Point taken, but seriously, what are you expecting it to draw? 5 million? It's GSN, not USA or TNT. You can't have a realistic expectation of assloads of viewers coming in because it's basically one of the nichest of niche channels. Not to mention that GSN, Wheel, and Jeopardy are under the same umbrella- maybe I might be missing something here but I wouldn't think the cost of promotion for those two shows would be anything more than drops in their collective buckets. Now, to promote the show on ET is a little more realistic cost wise (which I believe has been done), even though you can take the above statement I just made and remove GSN from it.
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Point taken, but seriously, what are you expecting it to draw?
More than what it's replacing?
but I wouldn't think the cost of promotion for those two shows would be anything more than drops in their collective buckets
I'd guess it's rather a bit more than the cost of promotion in general, seeing how little promotion they do.
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You can't have a realistic expectation of assloads of viewers coming in because it's basically one of the nichest of niche channels.
Why not? I'll bet that's the assumption they were going with when they emptied the bank accounts to buy this!
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Point taken, but seriously, what are you expecting it to draw? 5 million? It's GSN, not USA or TNT. You can't have a realistic expectation of assloads of viewers coming in because it's basically one of the nichest of niche channels.
My guess is that they were hoping for the same numbers, if not better than, Are You Smarter Than a Fifth Grader?, the top rated show for that week. 5 million? No, but I'd bet they were looking for half a million.
This just proves that GSN thinks they know what is best when in fact they don't. It also shows that they follow an old adage from Paul Williams and The Temptations...Don't Look Back.
"Reality didn't work the first time? Ah well. Things change, people change, we don't need Password back. Dump it all into Dancing with the Stars! We'll show those nuts on the message boards what's what!"
/Still bitter over the loss of Password (Classic/Plus/Super, I don't care, they were all great.)
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Point taken, but seriously, what are you expecting it to draw? 5 million?
Yes, eveyone here was expecting the show to claim 5 million viewers for GSN. That's just how stupid we are.
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Point taken, but seriously, what are you expecting it to draw? 5 million?
Yes, eveyone here was expecting the show to claim 5 million viewers for GSN. That's just how stupid we are.
It's called exaggerating, Matt. My point is that people are drawing attention to the numbers that the reruns of DWTS are pulling in and are calling it a not-so-good thing but are expecting maybe a little more than perhaps they should be considering what GSN pulls in normally.
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It's called exaggerating, Matt.
I can't tell if this belongs on Words Have Meanings, or that other show Matt did.
-Jason
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It's called exaggerating, Matt.
I can't tell if this belongs on Words Have Meanings, or that other show Matt did.
-Jason
Wait a second...what is this referring to, Matt's response to what I said, or the exaggeration I made in the post he responded to?
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I think it is safe to assume that GSN wanted to, at the very least, get better numbers for DWtS than they get for anything currently on their schedule - especially after buying the EW ad.
The question is whether this was a worthy gambit in the first place considering (a) the franchise is waning in popularity in first-run, and (b) BBC America already tried early-series reruns and had decided it wasn't worth their while to keep airing them even though they still have the rights.
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I think it is safe to assume that GSN wanted to, at the very least, get better numbers for DWtS than they get for anything currently on their schedule - especially after buying the EW ad.
The question is whether this was a worthy gambit in the first place considering (a) the franchise is waning in popularity in first-run, and (b) BBC America already tried early-series reruns and had decided it wasn't worth their while to keep airing them even though they still have the rights.
In their defense (hey, somebody has to), it's possible they're bringing a different (i.e. "younger and female") audience to the channel with DWTS. And while full page magazine ads and the like are probably expensive, they also got a lot of intangible free advertising from news stories about the acquisition. It's always good to have your name out there, and high-profile pickups are just about the only thing that gets the media interested in GSN stories anymore. Still, it's hard to imagine anybody at GSN is happy with the early returns.
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In its second week (http://thevoiceoftv.com/nielsen-tv-ratings/gsn-ratings-january-23-29-2012/), its best showing was 62nd place, with 264,000 viewers.
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In its second week (http://thevoiceoftv.com/nielsen-tv-ratings/gsn-ratings-january-23-29-2012/), its best showing was 62nd place, with 264,000 viewers.
To be clear for people who perhaps aren't following this as closely, that's 62nd place when compared to other programs on the same network, including a decades old 10am rerun of Card Sharks which did not have massive, national, full-page advertising support behind it.
I'd love to know what they paid for the acquisition, and how much original programming could have been created for that sum. They're still feasting (well, snacking anyway) off of Woolery Lingo after how many years now?
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I'd love to know what they paid for the acquisition, and how much original programming could have been created for that sum. They're still feasting (well, snacking anyway) off of Woolery Lingo after how many years now?
At least eight.
EDIT: First episodes of the GSN version began in 2002. So up to ten years old, depending on which episodes are shown.
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Normally, I would say these are only the prelims on DWTS. People don't really start watching until the final four. But, yeah, that wouldn't really matter in this case because anybody who wanted to watch it watched it in first-run. No rerun value for DWTS.
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In its second week (http://thevoiceoftv.com/nielsen-tv-ratings/gsn-ratings-january-23-29-2012/), its best showing was 62nd place, with 264,000 viewers.
I just wonder if GSN is going to try that old trick of adding A+B+C to come up with "LOOK! 500,000 viewers!", no matter what the ratings actually imply.
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Week three (http://thevoiceoftv.com/nielsen-tv-ratings/gsn-ratings-january-30-february-5-2012/) is a slight improvement (highest ranking for GSN shows in this week was #50, 292,000 viewers) but apparently it's too little, too late for GSN. BuzzerBlog is reporting (https://www.facebook.com/buzzerblog/posts/10150596918473493) the Friday night slots are going back to The $100,000 Pyramid.
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Buzzerblog now reports that it will be Dancing with the Stars once again this Friday, with an extra airing at 6:00pm-1:00am.
New ratings show that it did a little better this past Saturday, but not out of the park ratings to warrant all of these airings. Karn, O'Hurley, and Foxworthy continue to impress with well over 500,000 viewers in their respective marathons. Even the morning Card Sharks did well with over 300,000 viewers on a couple of its 10:00am airings. Even the Wednesday airing of Card Sharks came just above Dancing getting 340,000 viewers, with Dancing getting 336,000 viewers for its highest rating for the week.
http://thevoiceoftv.com/nielsen-tv-ratings/gsn-ratings-february-6-12-2012/?utm_source=twitterfeed&utm_medium=twitter