And the next host of Jeopardy! should be?

All of us who follow game shows, and plenty of people who don't, learned last month that Jeopardy! host Alex Trebek has pancreatic cancer. It's beatable, but the general consensus is that the odds are against him.

There are rumors that Sony, which produces Jeopardy!, is already considering possible replacements. Nobody wants to see Trebek replaced any time soon, but Sony is preparing for the unfortunate scenario that Trebek might not be returning to the helm. Several suggestions for the next host have been discussed wherever game show nerds congregate online. Some I like better than the others. Here's a list of potential hosts, and my response to them.

Jeff Probst: Game show fans suggest the host of TV's Survivor because he hosted Rock & Roll Jeopardy! from 1998 through 2001 on VH1. I never saw much of the show back in the day, but Probst was a rather straight forward host. He could handle Jeopardy with aplomb, but the guy irritates me, and I'd rather not be reminded of that when I watch the show.

I'm jealous of Probst, I'll be the first to admit it. He gets paid decent money for his idiotic hosting gig on Survivor. I've never been a fan of the show, but when I stop to watch 10 minutes of it now and then, listing to him do play-by-play during some goofy competition between the competing teams is painful. The guy has a great gig for which he clearly sold his soul to the devil. I don't want to be reminded of how annoying and silly his career has been by hearing him read questions about Shakespeare on weekday afternoons.

While the new host need not be a guy who will hold the job for 35 years, Probst is 57. Perhaps they should skew younger.

Chris Harrison: Nobody is suggesting this clown, but if you're going to consider Probst, I say consider Harrison, too.

Harrison is as worthless as Probst when it comes to The Bachelor franchise on ABC. I've watched The Bachelor for a few years, mostly because my buddy can't resist it, and it makes for great fodder when we talk. It's so stupid sometimes, I feel dirty for watching it, and can't believe my buddy has been tuning in for years. Harrison only adds to the stupidity. But again, it's a great gig. It's pointless, and it beats working for a living, although I have to believe the guy is basically a puppet.

For the past couple of years he's been holding a second job, hosting Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? He's decent at that, despite how annoying he is on The Bachelor. It's widely assumed that Millionaire is about to have its plug pulled. If so, Harrison could use a new second gig, and he's 47. He's got a few more years ahead of him than Probst, presumably.

I'm not rooting for either guy to garner any consideration, but I'd take Bachelor guy over Survivor guy.

Meredith Vieira: The first host of syndicated Millionare was suggested by somebody. She held that gig for more than a decade, and did fine. As for Jeopardy!, it ain't happening.

She has a new game show in the works for this fall called 25 Words or Less. So she's booked. She'd be fine as Jeopardy's host, but I'm an ageist, evidently. I seem to want the show to skew young in its hire. Meredith is 65 and quite capable, but let's look elsewhere.

Ken Jennings: There have been suggestions that the king of Jeopardy! take over as host. I like the idea. He's been on TV enough that he's comfortable in front of the camera. He's well known, thanks to the fact Jeopardy! trots him out every chance it gets for some new tournament. And at 44, he's about the age that Trebek was when he started hosting the revival. I like it. I'm no authority, but I gotta believe we've never had a popular game show contestant ascend to host of the show. It's unorthodox, but I have no problem with it.

If you really want to have fun with Jennings as the host, have him play along with Final Jeopardy! during each episode before learning who the day's champion is. A new twist for the show without changing the game play. I'll take it.

Brad Rutter: Jennings received plenty of mainstream media attention for his 74-game run on Jeopardy!, but Rutter is actually the king. Rutter's reign predated Jennings, when champs had to retire after winning five games. In all the super tournaments Jeopardy! has held in the years since Jennings dazzled the nation, Rutter has won every time, defeating Jennings in the process.

Rutter doesn't have the household cachet of Jennings, but he's just as smooth, is just as smart and is trying to carve out a career as an actor or host at this point, so he's more than ready to ascend to the Jeopardy! throne. He's 41, so he has a lot of years ahead of him, and Jeopardy! is running out of excuses to trot him out for special events. He could likewise play along with Final Jeopardy each day.

Anderson Cooper: In the past, Cooper has been suggested as a possible host, and he brings the air of authority you seek in a Jeopardy! host. I'd have no problem with it, but there is a faction that is rubbed the wrong way by the 51-year-old because he's a liberal pawn of CNN. I don't know how many people would boycott Jeopardy! if Cooper hosted it, but I have a feeling a few people would make a stink about him. Enough to keep him from getting the gig? Seems unlikely, but never underestimate a studio making the safe choice.

Tom Bergeron: Did somebody throw out his name somewhere? I think so. The former host of Hollywood Squares is a career emcee, and he hosts light fare, mostly. Despite the fact his paychecks since Hollywood Squares have been the C-list celebrity dance-a-thon and the funny video show, both on ABC, Bergeron would slide nicely onto the Sony set. But he's 63, so that might work against him.

Ricki Lake: Somebody suggested the part-time actress because she did a mediocre job of hosting a summer game show homage years ago. I'm sure she could do it, and I'm sure she'd dazzle nobody in the process.

Those are the names that come to mind. Of all of them, I'm inclined to choose Rutter if it's up to me. I like the idea of him or Jennings, and I think Rutter would be the better choice of the two.

There are suggestions that the new host should be a minority or female because we've had too many white guys historically, I guess. I don't care if the host is male or female, or what ethnic background the host possesses. Hire the best person, not a minority because it seems like the progressive thing to do.

Trebek had an established career in game shows when his Jeopardy! career began. He had hosted shows that skewed toward the intellectual, and shows that were less serious, and had elements of luck woven into the game play. Jeopardy's next host, whenever the day comes, need not be a brainiac who is considered the smartest person in the room. But Trebek lends an air of authority to the proceedings, and I have to think the next host will bring a similar tone to the job.

Why do we hate game shows?

I didn't really expect to appreciate the Snoop Dogg version of "Joker's Wild," and Snoop Dogg did not disappoint.

If you haven't seen the show, all you need to know is that it's the basic idea of "Joker's Wild," built around Dogg's persona. There are occasionally questions about general knowledge, although they're presented in reference to Snoop's life. Many questions are about pop culture topics, some of which nobody of reasonable intelligence could be expected to know. Category names, if not categories themselves, reference drugs. Talking about marijuana use makes the show appealing to today's modern game show viewer, evidently.

Plenty of questions use video segments featuring "celebrities," or other interactive elements. Some of these are just plain stupid.

The show is produced for TBS, so I didn't expect a traditional presentation of the classic game. Snoop is quite adept at hosting the game, and the set is well done. It is colorful and modern. It doesn't appear they went cheap on the set design. The audience is seated in a "lounge," which fits the vibe the show is trying to create with Snoop as the host.

I've come to accept that I'm in the minority. I enjoy a simple quiz show with an element of luck added to the game. The old "Joker's Wild" posed general knowledge and pop culture questions, but the pop culture questions weren't as ridiculous as Snoop trots out. "Sale of the Century" was not the most fascinating game, but it had a lot of elements throughout the game play. "High Rollers" was simple, but it was fun to watch each game unfold. "Joker's Wild" and "Tic Tac Dough" had interesting elements that made them enjoyable to watch, too. But I guess that's not enough for today's Twitter attention spans.

I guess if it's not "Jeopardy!" then we aren't interested.

Game shows will never be the same, fo shizzle.

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.

'Big Money' brings Michael Larson and Press Your Luck back to life

Never in my wildest dreams did I consider that a game show episode I watched as a teenager would one day be recreated on a theatrical stage.

Been there, done that.

Note: I will rely upon my memory occasionally, and it's a bit cloudy more than 30 years later. And I assume you have basic familiarity with the show, given you're reading a game show blog.

In 1984 a simple, exciting CBS game show called Press Your Luck was competing for viewers in the crowded daytime schedules of the major networks. There was a time when all three networks were in the game show business, and it was glorious.

Press Your Luck was a great game. It wasn't intellectually stimulating, it didn't have much of a play along factor, and occasionally the games were less than spectacular. But the format provided some great competition and amazing outcomes in its final round.

Michael Larson did something incredible in May 1984. As a contestant on the show he won $110,000 in cash and prizes. Rarely would a contestant win $25,000 in a single show on Press Your Luck, but Larson shocked the game show world with his incredible win.

And I saw him do it during the summer of 1984. His game lasted so long that it didn't fit into the show's 30-minute format, which was unheard of. They had to split his game between two 30-minute episodes. I'm not sure if I saw both episodes that summer, but I definitely saw the second part.

How did he win so much more than anyone had ever considered trying to win? It was rather simple.

We didn't have fancy home computers in 1984, but personal computers were available. We had them in school and used them for a variety of simple applications by today's standards. You'd think a game show that relied upon 18 television monitors with alternating screens and a light indicator bouncing around those 18 monitors would have a basic computer providing complete randomization of the game play. But that wasn't the case.

Larson figured out, by watching videotapes of the game over and over, that the light indicator moved about the board in patterns. There was more than one pattern, and he memorized them all so that he'd know when the light indicator would stop on one of two monitors. There were three different screens in each monitor. The screens might contain a cash amount, a prize or a "whammy," which wiped out your bank account. The odds of hitting a whammy were 1-in-6, as I recall reading somewhere.

The two monitors Larson focused upon had six screens offering cash, plus an additional spin. Players earned a limited number of spins for each of two rounds by answering a few trivia questions. By hitting squares that always offered an additional spin, Larson could potentially play for hours, if he had the stamina and focus to continue following the pattern.

It took him a few spins to get his timing down, but by round two he was hitting his buzzer and stopping the board repeatedly with the light indicator on one of the two key squares, allowing him to run up a total of $102,000 before he decided he had better play it safe and pass his remaining spins to another player, which the game allowed him to do. He had a few spins passed back to him and added another $8,000 to his total. The game came to an end moments later, cementing his place in game show history.

I've seen the Larson episodes a few times over the years. His big win aired one time, and was all but forgotten by CBS and the show's producers. They were embarrassed. They aired the show, awarded him his cash and prizes and never acknowledged him again during the next two years of the show's run.

Even when reruns of the show were aired on cable TV in the 1990s, the Larson episodes were blacklisted.

It wasn't until GSN, the cable network formerly known as Game Show Network, aired a documentary in 2003 about Larson's improbable win that the average Joe had a chance to revisit Larson's incredible accomplishment. The documentary, as well as the original episodes, are readily available on Youtube.

A month or so ago my girlfriend told me about a play at a St. Paul theater that was coming in January. She hates the fact I'm a game show fanatic, but will take any avenue available to entice me to see live theater with her. She read the synopsis of "Big Money." It was they story of Larson's life.

The original production by Sandbox Theatre tells the life story of Larson. I wouldn't call it must-see theater, even for game show fanatics, but it was pretty amazing to see his life adapted to live theater.

The play opens with a recreation of Larson's game. From host Peter Tomarken's comments, to the interviews with the contestants, and the four trivia questions that begin round 1, it was very faithful to the original broadcast. The main deviation: Larson is introduced third. He was in the second seat, but given he's the focal point of the play, his introduction is third.

After the opening segment of the TV show, the play deviates from the broadcast. Larson steps out from behind his podium for a monologue about his life.

Most of the play features snippets of his life, before and after the show. We learn that he was always looking for a way to make an easy buck. We see him covertly selling candy bars at his grade school, we see him opening up bank accounts all over town -- sometimes under a fake name -- to receive a $500 bonus for opening a new account, we see him explaining to his brother how he created a dummy company in order to collect unemployment insurance and we see him studying his tapes of Press Your Luck, trying to crack the code, much to the disappointment of his on-again, off-again wife, who just wants him to get a job and earn a steady paycheck.

The play revisits the game two more times: When Larson was on his roll during round 2, racking up thousands of dollars, and at the end of the show, when Tomarken was interviewing Larson about his game play and his down-on-his-luck tale of being an unemployed ice cream truck driver.

The rest of the play shows scenes from the studio on the day he was chosen as a contestant, and after his big win. There's a scene recreating Larson's audition to be a contestant, and a scene showing the producers panicking about his win, and how the network would respond. Did Larson cheat somehow? Or did he simply make them look like fools by exposing a flaw in their game play?

Scenes from his life following his win include a scene showing him eagerly investing $35,000 in an effort to increase his windfall. It takes money to make money, after all. There's also a scene showing Larson, his wife and daughter searching through $1 bills Larson had withdrawn from the bank, trying to match a serial number announced on a radio station in order to win $30,000. According to the play, he had withdrawn $50,000 in $1 bills.

There are also scenes showing Larson working at Walmart within a year or two of his big winning. His money was gone. His investments fizzled and his bags of $1 bills were stolen while he was at a Christmas party. He suspected his wife had something to do with their disappearance.

The  play also recreates his 1994 interview on ABC's Good Morning America. He was interviewed because of the popularity of the movie "Quiz Show," which was about game show scandals of the 1950s. I'm not sure if I saw the interview in 1994 or simply read a synopsis of it on TV Guide. (Does anyone know where to find Youtube video of his Good Morning America appearance?)

Sometime in the 1990s Larson wound up running some sort of lottery scam, which had him on the run from the FBI. He was estranged from his wife and daughter at that point, as well as his brother. We learn that he was diagnosed with throat cancer too late to adequately treat it.

The final scene of the play imagines Tomarken talking with Larson about the end of his life, on the set of a game show. Using dialogue mimicking the scenes we saw at the beginning of the play, we hear Larson reflect on his life.

I know the story of Larson better than most people, I'm sure, but I'm no expert. The GSN documentary did a good job of fleshing out details of his life. It explained how the producers disagreed upon whether or not they wanted to use Larson as a contestant when he showed up from Ohio to audition. They also talked about the concerns and embarrassment we see recreated in the play.

His tale of woe regarding the $1 bills and their burglary is well known by those who know the story of his life after the show. To the best of my knowledge the case was never solved.

But I didn't know about his life before Press Your Luck. I had never heard about the candy bars, the unemployment insurance scheme or the bank account fraud. I was left wondering what the source material was. I've never seen it.

I was familiar with most of the events from his life after the show, however.

So, did I like it?

I had mixed feelings.

On the whole, I liked it. It's a small theater, and it's a modest production. There are seven cast members, most of whom play multiple parts. Only the actor playing Larson is limited to a single role. But the cast does a nice job of morphing from one character to another.

The guy playing Larson was a bit exaggerated when recreating Larson's enthusiasm during the game play, but overall he seemed to embody the spirit of Larson. One of Larson's competitors on the show was a guy named Ed Long. The actor playing Long clearly studied him, as he did an outstanding job of replicating him. The actor playing Tomarken didn't remind me of the deceased emcee at all.

The props were limited, but the play did a nice job of using what little it had to work with. The creation of the game board was as simple as it could be, but one of prize squares depicted was a flokati rug. Diehard Press Your Luck fans will appreciate that.

I have to assume most people don't know the story of Larson. The play imagines the internal struggles Larson wrestled with in his lifelong quest to beat the system, and the price he paid. But it's not simply a cautionary tale. There's levity thrown in, and sometimes it didn't make sense.

My girlfriend characterized the play as eccentric, and theorized that they added the odd visuals and inexplicable moments to simply amuse audience members who aren't as hardcore about Larson's history. At one point there was nearly a song-and-dance routine, and plenty of times I found myself thinking, "That was wacky."

You won't find this play on Broadway any time soon. After this weekend it may never be seen again. The show was slated for a run barely more than two weeks, (13 total performances,) and it didn't get a lot of mainstream promotion locally, as far as I can tell, so I suspect other game show geeks in the Twin Cities don't even know they're missing it.

This wasn't community theater, but it certainly didn't have the sparkle and polish of a major theatrical production. Tickets are $40 to $60, evidently, but I attended on a discount night, so I have no complaint about the value of the production.

Bill Murray was allegedly going to play Larson in a biopic shortly after Larson's death, but that didn't happen. "Big Money" was a low-budget alternative to that unfulfilled promise, and I enjoyed it, despite its quirkiness.

I'm not sure why the folks at Sandbox Theatre dedicated their time and talent to the story of Larson, but I'm glad they did. I'm glad to know I'm not the only one who has been captivated by his story all these years.

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.