Buzzr has failed us

If you have no idea what Buzzr is, or why it exists, this might not mean a lot to you.

For those of us in the know, Buzzr is a digital network churning out old, dusty programming. A diginet is a cross between an old-fashioned broadcast network and a cable channel, I suppose. I'm no broadcasting expert, but with the switch some years ago from the traditional "airwaves" (that carried our local television broadcasts) to the fancy new digital delivery (which  old TVs need a converter box to receive) it suddenly became feasible for our local stations to carry second, third and fourth channels that are delivered locally.

The biggest diginets nationally seem to be the channels that carry endless reruns of old sitcoms, but there are several variations of them vying for viewership. Some carry lots of movies, some carry one-hour dramas, none seem to broadcast the short, somewhat brilliant half-season run of Jason Bateman's "It's Your Move."

Diginets typically carry content owned by their parent company, often a major movie and television studio conglomerate.

Less than two years ago I first heard about the planned launch of Buzzr by Fremantle, the company that produces The Price is Right, Let's Make a Deal and Family Feud. The company is the successor to Goodson-Todman Productions, a longtime producer of game shows both notable and forgettable. Fremantle owns a variety of properties outside of traditional game shows, and it owns the catalogs and rights of former game show production companies. Let's Make a Deal, for example, is not a Goodson-Todman original, but Fremantle now has it under the corporate umbrella.

Buzzr launched in the summer of 2015. If you were lucky, you had access to the channel the day it launched. Like most startups, it rolled out slowly. In my market, Minneapolis, we didn't get the channel until last September.

As a fan of traditional game shows, I was happy to learn I would be receiving Buzzr locally last fall. Sure, I've had occasional access to the former Game Show Network over the years, but I didn't have a lot of access to it in its earliest years, when it relied most heavily on classic game shows. 

GSN, as it is now known, has expanded its spectrum in a variety of ways over the years, and although its parent company, Sony, is in the game show business, it has relied upon the Fremantle catalog throughout its existence. These days it seems to rely most heavily upon access to every Family Feud episode hosted by Steve Harvey, and it broadcasts those episodes during many hours of the programming week.

I haven't had GSN access in years, and I didn't feel as if I was missing much. To have access to classic game shows all day, every day, via Buzzr was a welcome opportunity. And yet Buzzr has let me, and others, down in many ways.

I quickly learned that blocks of its daily programming are repeated, which makes sense. Nobody is going to watch the network 24 hours per day, so you might as well give people a couple of windows of opportunity to watch Buzzr's core programming each day.

The problem, as we all know, is that Buzzr broadcasts but a few weeks of any one program at a time, and then seems to repeat that block of shows several times. Within a few weeks of watching Buzzr you start seeing the same programs being broadcast. Likewise, the weekend programming seems to recycle programming from earlier in the week. If you watched Match Game during the week, you have no incentive to tune in during the weekend.

I've read analysis of why Buzzr does this. And it makes some sense. Fremantle may own the shows, and it owns the channel, but there's a value to those old programs, and like any good corporation, its divisions have to operate like independent entities. Buzzr can't simply take whatever it wants from the Fremantle library. The value of the commodity has to be accounted for.

If the costs of operating Buzzr aren't being covered by the revenue generated by the diginet, then the diginet is a bad idea. Fremantle knows there's value in its programming, as GSN is paying for the rights to broadcast Fremantle programs, particularly Harvey's Family Feud.

I have no idea how soon Fremantle is looking to operate Buzzr as a profitable diginet, but I have to assume it has yet to reach that point. And I have to assume Fremantle isn't willing to invest heavily into Buzzr. Therefore we see far too many repeats, far too often.

The problem is that Buzzr isn't giving me enough reason to tune in on a weekly basis. I should be able to count on a new one-hour block of Match Game or Family Feud every weekday, for years to come. I don't need four hours of unique Match Game episodes every day, but it's foolish that Buzzr has broadcast countless hours of Match Game since its inception, using the same few months of programming from 1978. Instead of building loyalty to its network, Buzzr is discouraging me from sticking around.

No, I haven't memorized those episodes, but even if I don't remember the exact outcome, I'm not interested in watching the same contestants I saw a month ago.

Perhaps plenty of people don't mind watching the same parade of celebrity couples on Tattletales every month, but knowing there are thousands upon thousands of hours of programs in the Fremantle library, the fact that Buzzr keeps recycling the same 1 percent of that library is annoying, and off putting.

Buzzr occasionally comes up with a good idea or marketing gimmick, yet finds a way to turn some of those into failures, too.

I was following Buzzr's Facebook feed before the channel was available in Minneapolis. Shortly before the channel was added in my market, Buzzr asked viewers which shows it should add from its library to a three-hour Sunday night block. There were six choices, and three would make it to broadcast. I was a fan of Sale of the Century, so I was glad to see that it was one of the shows added.

I was also curious to see Double Dare, a 40-year-old show hosted by Alex Trebek that was also voted into the Sunday night lineup. Monty Hall's short-lived revival of Beat the Clock rounded out the trifecta. Buzzr started showing one-hour blocks of each show twice on Sunday nights. With little exception, that's the only time of the week those shows have been broadcast on Buzzr.

According to Wikipedia, Double Dare lasted just 96 episodes. At two episodes per week, Double Dare doesn't have a deep enough catalog to last for an entire year. But that's fine. It was an interesting enough show that I was hooked. I was looking forward to making sure I caught the one-hour block of Double Dare during one of its two Sunday night broadcasts each week, and it would take me nearly a year to see all 96 episodes. It became appointment viewing.

And of course Buzzr failed again. Just like Match Game and the rest of the weekday offerings, Buzzr trotted out a small portion of its Sunday night lineup and started repeating the episodes. Buzzr turned Sunday nights into appointment viewing for me, and then it decided it didn't need to keep me around any longer.

News flash: There are only so many of us who will sit through broadcasts of old game shows. It's a niche market, and Buzzr is turning away that limited commodity with its questionable business plan.

And as of today Buzzr seems to be upsetting most of those who want to comment on its Facebook page. Buzzr just completed a major juggling of its already suspicious schedule. Buzzr is promising "fresh" episodes from its archive, and is doubling down on its Match Game and Family Feud offerings. (Almost all of its Feud broadcasts have been from the Richard Dawson era. Only for a special occasion will Buzzr trot out a Ray Combs episode, and it won't touch anything produced since the late 1990s.)

The increased Family Feud and Match Game broadcasts might seem like good news, but Buzzr seems to think that cutting out chunks of its previous weekday offerings in order to give us more Gene Rayburn and Dawson is a good idea. I'd rather have a "fresh" variety of shows instead of more Match Game every day. But who needs variety, right?

And while there's an audience for Buzzr's black-and-white celebrity panel question-and-answer shows of the 1950s and '60s, I gotta believe it's a fraction of the audience for old Match Game episodes, yet Buzzr now insists of dedicating two of its three prime time hours to the black-and-whites, which of course get repeated in the following three hours.

Yeah, I'll still stumble upon Match Game and watch, but Buzzr is no longer a go-to channel for me. They've managed to alienate me, and I'm a big fan of a lot of classic game shows. It's hard to believe the channel is failing me 11 months after it was added in Minneapolis. I never would have guessed.

Can Buzzr be salvaged? Perhaps, but I'm not expecting it. There are things that would make Buzzr a more appealing channel, but I don't expect to see any of them happen at this point. In some cases I can only guess why, but I'll try.

One way to fix Buzzr is obvious, quit repeating episodes every four or six weeks. Commit to a "fresh" six- or eight-hour block each weekday and repeat it three or four times. Make it easy for viewers to know when they can find their favorite show, so they get three opportunities each weekday. Eight hours of "fresh" programs each day would allow for the two-hour black-and-white block and six hours of technicolor goodness. Give us an hour of Match Game, Family Feud, Let's Make a Deal, Press Your Luck and Card Sharks, and fill out that sixth hour with one half-hour of Sale of the Century, Tattletales or something else and you'll have plenty of us tuning in regularly. Sure, Press Your Luck will run out long before Match Game, but that's life. Either repeat the entire Press Your Luck run over again at that point or insert a new Fremantle property for a year or two before starting over.

So Buzzr would have to access more of that valuable Fremantle catalog. So what? You have to spend money to make money. Prepare to lose money for a few years in order to make money, particularly if Buzzr is intended to be a viable long-term diginet. If Buzzr doesn't build an audience, it won't make it. And as I noted, it's a limited audience that Buzzr is trying to capture. Most youngsters are not going to take a second look at programs their grandparents enjoyed as young adults.

The more obvious way to generate steam for Buzzr is to draw upon the elephant in its catalog. The Price is Right is nowhere to be found on Buzzr. The show had a short run on GSN, by all accounts, and it is a non-starter on Buzzr. I'm going to guess there are two reasons for it. One, I suspect Bob Barker has some power to control how his episodes are rebroadcast. It's well known he has blocked the airing of old episodes that featured fur coats as prizes. I'm guessing that as long as he is alive, and perhaps even after he dies, Fremantle is a bit handcuffed by the fact that Barker eventually gained executive producer duties for the show.

And I suspect that Fremantle's agreement with CBS limits its ability to recycle past episodes. Even if the Barker episodes are off limits, recycle Drew Carey episodes from the past few years, and use them in prime time. That way they don't interfere with the CBS daytime airing. That would be the single-best way to draw people to Buzzr, but somehow that isn't happening.

Ditto for Let's Make a Deal. The CBS version has been on the air for several years now. Run episodes from past seasons in prime time each night and I guarantee more people will tune in to Buzzr than will tune in to see coma-inducing black-and-white celebrity panels from 50-plus years ago. Buzzr has given us classic Monty Hall episodes of Let's Make a Deal, so the title doesn't appear to be blacklisted from Buzzr. Find a way to to bring Wayne Brady to Buzzr each night, even if it means promoting the new episodes via local CBS affiliates. Business folk like to call that "synergy." 

Casual game show fans have no idea why shows like Joker's Wild, Tic Tac Dough, Wheel of Fortune or Jeopardy! aren't on Buzzr. The simple answer is that they're not Fremantle properties, and the assumption is that Buzzr will only show Fremantle programs. There may not be a lot of game shows available for Buzzr to lease, a la GSN, but spending a little cash on the most recent rendition of Hollywood Squares wouldn't hurt ratings, and would give viewers something a little more modern than programs that last aired in 1985. Oldies are sometimes goodies, but not every oldie needs to be 30 years old. 

Buzzr will never be everything to everybody. No matter what it airs, or when it airs the episodes, there will be people who don't like what it offers, or how it presents the programming it broadcasts. But to this point Buzzr seems to be doing just about everything wrong, and if you don't fix something that is broken, it will soon become worthless.

ABC's Match Game, episode 2: Instant reaction

A couple of days late again, and I'm not going to do this weekly, I swear, but here's another round of spontaneous reactions to an episode of Match Game, specifically the second week's show, courtesy of streaming video.

Are Rosie O'Donnell and Tituss Burgess the new Brett and Charles? I like Tituss well enough, but Rosie is hard to stomach under any circumstance these days, although she wasn't nearly as annoying as I expected last week.

After round 1 of game 1 I'm still not overwhelmed by this show. The panel isn't winning me over. I like Adam Goldberg, and so far he hasn't dazzled me.

Round 2 is underway, and it's clear that Alec Baldwin really loves the sound of his voice. And he's great at spouting off pre-scripted jokes.

Sherri Shepherd is easily winning "most annoying celebrity" on this week's show.

O'Donnell is the super match celebrity for the third consecutive time. Why do contestants think she's the Richard Dawson of the 2016 panel?

Why don't Baldwin's eyes open fully?

Why do they tell the contestants to dance like cheerleaders when they spin them around on the turntable?

Game 2 round 1, first question isn't about sex. Answers are limited to seemingly two responses, it seems, and yet "Jason" gave a third answer. It's a shame that half the questions seem to be sexual, but not surprising.

Shepherd is terrible at this game. She wins this week's JB Smooth award for stupidity.

Why is Goldberg wearing that dorky bandana around his neck?

After an unexciting game 2 we have another winner. It will be interesting to see what happens if this slow-paced show ever ends in a tie after two rounds.

Audience match for game 2: The contestant, whose name I have forgotten, blew it, so she gets $1,000 as a consolation prize so that they can have a super match. And she picked O'Donnell, like everybody else. She's the third out of four contestants to fail at the super match. Such a shame.

ABC's Match Game: Instant reaction

I'm watching the new Match Game one night after it aired. I have avoided reading critiques of it to this point, so here are reactions to my initial viewing of the first episode.

I don't mind the updated look to the set. I'm sure some people wanted the classic Gene Rayburn set recreated.

It's obvious after the first segment that banter by the host and celebrities is mandated in order to stretch out the game play. Alec Baldwin's jokes aren't great, and they seem forced.

What kind of stimulants did they pump the initial two contestants full of? Marissa isn't over the top, but middle-aged Alissa is whack-tastic. (The lack of last names and cities of residence for the contestants is annoying. I'm old fashioned.)

First question of the show: A question about the "adults only" section of Costco. Exactly what I feared.

But the next two questions were somewhat clever without being overly sexual. The fourth question seemed to lead to only one possible answer, which game Alissa an easy win.

Who the hell is this JB Smooth and why does he think he's the star of the show? His dance session in the middle of the game with Alissa didn't entertain me, it annoyed me. A lot.

This Sutton Foster woman in the sixth celebrity seat is the opposite of Smooth. I don't know who she is, but at least she's not annoying.

And Rosie O'Donnell is rather sedate on this show, much to my surprise.

Two segments into the show and Baldwin has lost me as host.

After two segments Alissa is playing the audience match for up to $5,000, and she is nuttier than a fruitcake. It's hard to root for her.

Smooth is dancing again. Make him stop.

Alissa just lost the head-to-head match with O'Donnell, and I'm not the least bit disappointed.

So with one game in the books Baldwin has disappointed me as host, the emphasis on celebrity wisecracking is more than I care for and JB Smooth is insufferable. Despite all that, it's not a horrible update of the game. Perhaps today's game show viewers want the celebrity antics that I have little patience for.

Game 2: First question has a pun about Uranus, and the celebrities are making gay sex and genital wart jokes. And JB Smooth is canvassing the celebrities again for their answers. This guy is 10 times more annoying than I expected O'Donnell to be.

Question about Donald Trump wakes O'Donnell from her coma, predictably.

Smooth is not only annoying, he sucks at Match Game. Worst celebrity on the panel by a country mile.

Baldwin just threw to a commercial by suggesting sexual innuendo about Debra Messing. Why not, this ain't 1976.

I expected Michael Ian Black to be more entertaining than he has been. He's not bad, but I feel like he's underwhelmed by the show.

Round 2: Mick Jagger question about Viagra, followed by a Mr. Potato Head question suggesting drug or alcohol use.

I thought a couple of the questions from the first week of the show were creative and fun, but it's hard to applaud the writers when they go for cheap, obvious answers like "boner" in the Mick Jagger question.

I've got one final super match round to go for episode 1. I'll forgo further critique.

Overall the show isn't as lowbrow as I expected, but it certainly panders to that crowd. I doubt it's going to win over game show purists. Perhaps there's a large enough audience for what ABC is selling, but I'm skeptical this show has legs, either as a summer prime time offering or as a future syndicated program.

The new Match Game: Rooting for it, betting against it

Last week the world learned that we're getting a new version of Match Game this summer. 

This is far from the first time there has been talk of a new version of the 1970s classic, and it's at least the fourth crack at it in the United States. Most Match Game fans know that the show, in the classic format we all love, hosted by Gene Rayburn, went off the air in 1982. It had been on CBS daytime for much of the '70s and eventually added a syndicated version that hung on until 1982. 

The first revival was a version on NBC that lasted about a year, and was combined with Hollywood Squares into one hour. This version is routinely panned by the fans. Although there were a lot of things wrong with the product, the idea of putting the two games together into one 60-minute show wasn't horrible. Rayburn co-hosted the program.

The show returned for one year in 1990-91 on ABC, sans Rayburn. An attempt at a syndicated version lasted one year during the 1997-98 season. 

A new version of the show had some success on Canadian television a few years ago. I've seen clips of it online, and it's very similar to the classic, with mostly unknown comedians serving as the celebrity panel. The only notable comedian (for me, anyway) on the panel in this low quality clip is Norm Macdonald. (Online reviews of the show suggest that the questions and answers are mostly lowbrow, and that the panel is more annoying than entertaining. Perhaps that's why I didn't stream episodes of this show regularly when I discovered it a few years ago.)

Several years ago cable network TBS considered bringing the show back, using the classic set and going so far as to tape a pilot, but the show never got off the ground. (The host didn't impress me during the few seconds I was able to sample his work in the clip below.)

Let's do the math. Since the classic Rayburn version went off the air in 1982 we've had three failed versions of the show and a pilot for TBS that was never picked up. Yet 34 years later ABC is going to try to reignite the show yet again? In prime time? Good luck. 

I want the show to succeed. I really do. But I'm also skeptical that it will. And if by some act of God it does succeed, I'll likely be disappointed. 

The classic version worked because it had the right formula at the right time. The game play was competitive, yet funny. In the 1970s you couldn't be sexually explicit on television. References to boobs were made occasionally, but it wasn't overdone. If the questions suggested that the answer could be penis, it was never said to the best of my knowledge, even by a slang name. That kind of thing didn't fly on TV in the 1970s. 

Instead the show relied upon the wittiness of Richard Dawson and Charles Nelson Reilly, among others. Add to that the goofiness of Brett Somers, Patti Deutsch, Joyce Bulifant and others, and you had an amusing show. Rayburn added his own humorous touch for good measure. Sometimes that meant reading questions while doing characters that would be politically incorrect today. A white guy doing a Chinese accent while reading a question about Confucius would be lambasted in 2016. 

GSN produced a documentary about Match Game many years ago, and it contained a lot of interview clips with celebrities and off-the-air staff members. I don't remember who said it, but somebody explained that after so many years the novelty of questions featuring double entendres and sexual innuendo no longer held the same charm. 

The appetite for Match Game wasn't there in 1990, and from the occasional episodes I have sampled online, the panel and host, Ross Shafer, just didn't have the chemistry to recreate the frivolity and entertainment of its predecessor, even with Charles as a regular panelist and Brett as a guest panelist during some weeks. (I need to find online clips of those episodes.)

I don't remember much about the 1998 version, I'm not sure if it even aired locally, but of the few clips I've seen of it, the show was more dependent upon sexual explicitness. A clip of the show from some "funniest game show moments" compilation show features every panelist giving some slang term for penis as an answer. This shouldn't be surprising, as broadcast standards had been lowered quite a bit between 1982 and 1998.

So here we are, 17 years after the last run of Match Game went off the air, waiting for ABC to try to rekindle magic we haven't seen in more than three decades. I wonder why I'm skeptical.

Baldwin seems like a good choice for emcee. He's witty and charismatic, and he has a variety of broadcasting experiences that should help him grow into the role quickly. A lot of what will make or break the show is the caliber of the celebrities it recruits for the panel. We're not going to see A-list celebrities on the show, but it had better not try to sell us washed up sitcom stars, long-in-the-tooth comedians or the uninteresting reality TV personalities that will be begging for a seat on the panel. And the panelists better be witty and sharp, because that's a lot of what people want from the show. Standard game play with funny questions and obvious answers won't cut it. 

Yet even with a winning panel and host, will that be enough? Will people still want to tune in for an hour each Sunday night to see if celebrities match the silly answers given by contestants to questions about Dumb Dora? 

I hope that the show tries to succeed without being "edgy." Will we see a lot of questions with sexual overtones and hear a lot of euphemisms for the penis? Questions begging for those types of answers will get old in a hurry. Then again, there's still an audience for the crap Jerry Springer is peddling, so maybe that's a key to the success. 

So yes, I'm rooting for the show to succeed, but I'm selfish. I want it to succeed on my terms. And I'm skeptical that can happen. I suspect that its best chance to succeed is by following the formula Steve Harvey and Family Feud have mastered, dropping periodic sexual references into the show.

There are some folks who have already decided that they don't want the show to succeed, as they are certain a 2016 version could never be as much fun as the classic edition.

ABC probably isn't interested in pleasing them. I'm sure the network will be trying to draw viewers who don't wax nostalgic for the 1970s, and don't incessantly watch the '70s reruns.

I find the idea of rooting against the show to be silly. My expectations are incredibly low, but I wouldn't rule out the possibility we could end up with a show that is as good, or better, than the show we love from the 1970s. 

Match Game, after all, started as a straightforward game with Rayburn as its host during the 1960s. Airing more than 1,700 episodes on NBC, the show lacked the comedic elements that the 1970s gave us. 

Even during its early episodes from 1973, the new Match Game had some straightforward questions that had no element of humor to them. As the story went, according to that GSN documentary, the show wasn't doing so well out of the gates and the producers opted to go full throttle with the humor since they figured they were about to be canceled, and therefore had nothing to lose. 

Had the producers remained faithful to the formula that worked so well in the 1960s, we'd never have had a 10-year run, staring in 1973, that is still highly regarded today.

It's unlikely that lightning will strike again in 2016, and odds are that any success by Baldwin and company won't resonate with me, or others who cherish the classic episodes. But I'm glad to see that ABC and Fremantle, the company that owns Match Game, are going to take another stab at it. Perhaps we'll all be pleasantly surprised, and laugh our blanks off this summer.