The Game Show Network continues to churn out original programming and turned to a fondly remembered name in search of a modern game show audience.
GSN's Tic Tac Dough rolled out in mid-April. I like it. It's not appointment television, it airs 30 minutes before Wheel of Fortune in my market and it's nearly summer in Minnesota, a short window of the year when it is both light outdoors and pleasant in the evening. Sometimes you have to mow the lawn.
I have sampled TTD several times, and I find it enjoyable. And it is hilarious, albeit not obviously so.
Why I like it: The show differs from what I remember fondly during the Wink Martindale era. But it's not bad.
Points are earned for correct answers and making a tic-tac-toe, and after two head-to-head rounds each player gets a minute to bank as many points as possible during a solo game known as the "60-second challenge round."
There are no returning champions, so that necessitates game play moving at a quick pace. There's no time for a drawn out, epic battle between two contestants. If a game ends in a draw, no big deal. No bonus points are awarded to either player. Onto the next round.
If the contestants are struggling to answer questions correctly and the game has gone on too long, then a time limit kicks in. The contestants get whatever points they have earned to that point and it's onto the next round. No outcome is necessary.
The board has categories assigned to all but the center square, which is a mystery category and requires two correct answers to earn. Unlike traditional categories such as "maps of states" or "U.S. history," the categories are often less obvious, such as "home sweet home," "all the feels" or "the loan arranger."
The questions in the first two rounds seem to lean heavier toward pop culture, but not entirely. And they have multiple choice answers. In the challenge rounds, questions seem more difficult, leaning less on pop culture, and are not multiple choice.
The first two games move quickly for a couple of reasons. In this version of TTD, the dragon is hiding behind one of the squares, and picking him equals losing your turn. Given most of the questions in the first two rounds are not difficult, finding the dragon increases the chance you'll lose the game. Likewise, an incorrect answer also makes it far easier for your opponent to win the game. And that's what GSN TTD wants, complete games, not a marathon battle of wits.
There are special squares that pop up infrequently. If you choose a category that is hiding a special square, you will find that the question has an added element which often allows either player to earn the square. Such questions don't always speed up game play, but they will when contestant X chooses the category for a block, but contestant O ends up earning the square and winning the game.
It's not the best quiz show, but given GSN doesn't like returning champions on its shows, they can't make the questions too difficult in the opening rounds if they want to play two games before the "challenge round." The challenge round is a trademark of the GSN formula, as it aims to ensure both players have a chance of winning the game at the start of the final round of play. For the challenge round, finding the dragon on the board takes five seconds off your clock.
Take all the points for each player over three rounds and crown your winner! Award them $1,000, regardless of their point total.
Then there's the rather uninspired bonus round. It's basically the 60-second challenge round. But in this case the dragon is visible and moves around the board with each turn, typically delaying a player's ability to complete a tic-tac-toe. And like the challenge round, an incorrect answer takes a box out of play for the duration of the round.
But all you have to do is answer three questions correctly in a line, sometimes with a delay in doing so because of the dragon, and you win $10,000. It's edge-of-the-seat television.
GSN has done a good job of packing a lot into the show, and it's probably what today's short-attention span viewers want in a quiz show. It's not exactly what I'm looking for in a quiz show, but nothing is.
I don't love the show, but it's not the worst way to pass 30 minutes. They cram a lot of game play into 20 minutes of actual show. It blew me away when I realized that its 30-minute time slot contains 10 minutes of advertising.
Brooke Burns, who GSN loves, does just fine as host. She's good at the banter with the contestants, which is another one of those things I'm not looking for in a game show, but it's mandatory for today's viewing audiences, evidently.
Why I don't like it: I don't hate the bonus round, and there's no rule on what a bonus round should or shouldn't consist of, but it seems like GSN bonus games are all continuations of the main game's play. I'm sure there's some GSN original that doesn't follow that format and I just can't think of it. But I'd be happy with watching a TTD bonus game where the winner's fate is determined by luck rather than trivia knowledge, like I remember from the 1980s.
That's probably my biggest gripe. I don't mind the bonus round quiz, it's just not my preference.
Why I find the show hilarious: The hilarity comes not from the show, but from the game show snobs who commented about it.
I saw a couple of Facebook posts about the show when it debuted in April, and of course there were plenty of people who found the show unacceptable for all sorts of silly reasons. Some of the complaints were that the show wasn't exactly the same as the old timers fondly remember.
Hey, I liked Wink's version from the '80s, and I enjoy drawn out showdowns between good contestants, as well as returning champions. But I'm smart enough to know that nearly 40 years after Wink's version of the show went dark, the 2025 version isn't going to play the same.
Hell, Wink's version (which he left after several years, to be replaced by Jim Caldwell for the final season) wasn't played the same throughout its run. As the years went on, the show added more of those special categories that allowed contestants to win a box when it wasn't their turn. That made it a lot harder for champions to retain their crown, of course, and effectively prohibited champions from running off 43 victories in a row, which Thom McKee did circa 1980.
So it was OK for the show to evolve during Wink's era, but the show cannot evolve for a GSN run in 2025?
Sure thing, old man.
Other complaints that made me laugh, in no particular order:
The dragon factors into the regular game play. That offended somebody. (Under Wink, the dragon was merely the enemy during the bonus game.)
The game awards points rather than cash for each correct answer. No matter how many points you amass during the main game, you win $1,000 for a victory. (Under Wink, correct answers translated into cash, with the winner of the game taking the pot, which could total thousands of dollars after a multi-game showdown.)
The show needs a real set, not a "fake" one. (The game board is a big fancy video screen rather than a 1980s behemoth featuring nine video monitors.)
All of those complaints aren't deal breakers for me, but I sense they are for some longtime fans of the show.
While not a complaint, I am amused by the lack of basic tic-tac-toe strategy demonstrated by some of the contestants. I've seen more than a few poor choices thus far. This ain't chess, the basic strategy of tic-tac-toe ain't that hard!
I didn't see many of these, but a few comments topped all others when it came to hilarity. Those were the comments that referenced Wink. They fell into two categories.
There were two or three people who insisted Wink should be hosting the 2025 version of the show.
The guy was 91 years old when the show debuted in April, (and died during the debut week of GSN's show.) Wink seemed rather spry for his age. I don't know if he was as active as he was in radio at the time of his death, but he remained rather active in recent years, and he was one of the old timers that the media could call upon when one of his contemporaries died.
Wink might have been able to hold his own for 30 minutes. He may have been mentally and physically younger than an average 91-year-old man, but nobody is hiring Wink, or any other 90-year-old broadcaster, to emcee an ongoing game show. That's silly talk. But there are rubes out there who think Wink should have been the host because he once held a similar job 40 years earlier.
But the most hilarious comment was the suggestion that the first episode of GSN TTD should have had Wink present to anoint Brooke Burns as the host of the show. Yeah, some clown really thought that was necessary.
There's a weird obsession some folks have when an emcee or host takes over an existing show. They think there has to be some sort of ceremonial passing of the microphone, or something like that. Perhaps that was done somewhere in television history, but it's not really a thing. Bob Barker didn't hand off a microphone to Drew Carey on The Price is Right.
I think Pat Sajak and Ryan Seacrest appeared on screen together prior to Pat's retirement on Wheel of Fortune, but I doubt that made Seacrest haters suddenly decide Seacrest would be a great host of Wheel. Pat didn't give a blessing to Ryan. The decision was made regardless of what Pat and Ryan did or didn't do on stage at the end of a show.
Yes, some old man really thought Wink's presence on the set of GSN's Tic Tac Dough was somehow important to the launching of a new show that has the same name as a show he watched in 1981.
Game show people are weird. But you already knew that. X gets the square. (Yes, I'm mixing my game show lexicons.)
