The title of this is misleading. Wheel of Fortune evolves, and it has its flaws, but it's largely the same game I've known for 40 years. Yes, it has been around longer than Pat and Vanna want you to think.
Jeopardy! continues to be true to its format. Very little gimmickry finds its way into a broadcast.
And for all the changes and updates that have come along in the 10 years Drew Carey has hosted The Price is Right, it still feels like I'm watching the same game show from my youth.
But today's TV audience doesn't seem to be very impressed with the traditional game show.
It seems like any game show on TV, be it a 30-minute show plugged into an odd hour of a TV station's schedule or a 60-minute prime time affair, needs to have one of three things in order to capture an audience, if not all three.
Big money needs to be part of the equation in many instances. Watching people play Deal or No Deal for a $50,000 prize wasn't going to garner much attention. There had to be a huge prize out there. This all started with ABC's prime time showcase for Who Wants to Be a Millionaire. Suddenly every network wanted to draw huge ratings with a prime time game show. Fox rolled out Greed, and dangled a $2 million prize, for example.
The hosts of most shows of the past 17-plus years have not been your traditional emcees. That seems to be important, too. Deal or No Deal chose Howie Mandel, known to many either for his acting or for his comedy. He wasn't exactly a hot commodity at the time he was tapped to host the game. If anything, it resurrected his career.
Regardless, he represented a trend in emcees that emerged with the resurrection of the prime time game show. Your emcees of yesteryear typically brought a sense of humor to the proceedings, but they weren't there to interject it. More often than not these days, the emcee is chosen as much to be an entertainer as to be the host.
Bob Barker had great comedic timing as host of The Price is Right. But he didn't overuse it. He never made the show about him. I can't say the same for Steve Harvey and Family Feud.
And finally, many of the big money game shows need to interject human drama into the game. That must reel viewers in somehow. Plenty of Mandel's Deal or No Deal contestants had some sort of external situation that was played up and used to sell the game. "Marcia, you're a single mother, you have five kids, you work three full-time jobs and you're going to college to try to better you life. $85,000 would mean so much to your family....."
I happened to catch a few minutes of the latest NBC get-rich-quick affair, The Wall. I haven't seen enough of the show to have the slightest idea of how it works. But during those two or three minutes I watched, host Chris Hardwick built up the drama regarding the big cash prize while the husband-and-wife duo vying for it had an overly emotional exchange on stage. I needed a barf bag.
The old days of watching people play a competitive quiz game for nice prizes just doesn't seem to hold much interest to today's viewers. Simple games built around general knowledge, such as Sale of the Century, High Rollers and Tic Tac Dough, really don't stand a chance. Perhaps the closest we've come outside of Jeopardy! during the past 20 years is the six-year run of Hollywood Squares, and that ended more than a decade ago.
GSN, formerly known as Game Show Network, has had some success developing traditional games that lasted for more than a year, but nothing set the world on fire. And if it ain't Jeopardy!, it has to have one of today's criteria mentioned above, and usually more than one.
When I read today that there's going to be a new version of Joker's Wild, I quickly lost my enthusiasm.
Rap music's Snoop Dogg is going to host a new version on TBS, a cable channel with a poor track record of developing game shows. I'm not going to tell you I will hate it, because I might be surprised. But I'm not as excited as I should be.
Joker's Wild had a simple format, offering a game of "strategy, knowledge and fun." It was a quiz show with an element of luck. That's all I needed.
The new TBS version promises an update to the game. It will be more than the simple quiz show that went off the air more than 30 years ago. (I'm ignoring the short-lived, mostly unnoticed one-year revival from the early 1990s.)
But I have a hard time believing Snoop Dogg will play it straight. He might not be a comedian, but I suspect he'll interject his personality into the show more than I'll care for, and he'll probably take on the role of cheerleader during the show. That seems to be something hosts do today. I don't need to be prompted as to when I should be excited for a contestant, and I don't need to see my hosts celebrating with the contestants. But I suspect Snoop Dogg will work the audience and celebrate as if he's the winner when somebody walks away with a nice prize. I guess that's what people watching game shows want to see these days, but to me it takes away from the game.
Then again, the game doesn't seem to be as important to people watching a game show in 2017. At least not Family Feud. I'm sure plenty of people watching Family Feud today would never come back if Harvey were to be replaced by Todd Newton tomorrow. Todd Newton is younger than Harvey, but more traditional in his hosting style. I guarantee you the show would take a huge dip in the ratings were Newton to replace Harvey. That's the world I live in. (I watched plenty of Family Feud in my life. It has a play-along factor, but I've never loved it. I'm never going to watch it religiously, no matter who the host is.)
I'm guessing that since the new Joker's Wild is on TBS, it's not going to have a ridiculous prize budget. Given that, and the fact Snoop Dogg is the host, I'm not expecting the show to drip with personal drama as contestants compete for a bonus round prize of $10,000 or $20,000. So in order for the show to connect with todays' game show viewers, it's going to have to attract people who find Snoop Dogg to be entertaining enough to watch go through the motions of hosting a game show.
If it succeeds, odds are it won't be because of me. If it turns out that I think it's a good show, you can bet it will have a short lifespan. Fo shizzle my nizzle.
