TV Tuesday: Playing Along

[yourlibrarian]

Do you watch or have you ever followed a game show? What makes a good game show, to you?

Comments

[dine]

as a kid, I watched & enjoyed many of the 60s game shows, but once older pretty much gave up on them (except when sick or unemployed for long periods). one that stuck with me for decades was Jeopardy, which I was addicted to for years.

imo, the best shows offer entertainment, with a chance to root for a winner, yell at the vagaries of chance, or be impressed with a contestant's knowledge of arcane information. they're mostly mindless fun, and there's a place for that in one's life

[yourlibrarian]

Hee, love your icon!

And definitely, I never picked up the habit myself as growing up TV watching wasn't allowed with certain exceptions (usually holiday specials or some things we watched as a family). As I grew older I was generally allowed a few hours a day so my choices were limited.

I think the types of game shows has also expanded a lot, with some crossing over with other unscripted programming.

[jo]

Growing up, there were a couple of Canadian game shows that I used to watch regularly. One was Front Page Challenge, which featured a panel of journalists attempting to guess a recent or old news story with which a hidden guest challenger was linked by asking him or her questions. So maybe not a typical game show as there weren't random normals as contestants who won a prize or anything like that. The other was also not a typical game show with prizes, but it did at least have an actual contestant. That was Party Game and it featured two teams of three players in a charades competition: the Challenger Team was composed of a contestant joined with two guest star players, while the Home Team consisted of series regulars Jack Duffy, Dinah Christie and Billy Van (who some may remember from The Hilarious House of Frightenstein).

In more recent decades, I've watched Jeopardy with varying degrees of regularity, but not much since Alex Trebek died. I quite enjoy UK panel game shows like Have I Got News For You, QI, Never Mind the Buzzcocks, Would I Lie to You, and Mock the Week, before it was cancelled by the BBC. None of those are "game shows" in the traditional sense of having prizes and such, or non-celeb contestants.

I'm sort of assuming you're not counting competition-type shows in this (e.g. Bake Offs, Traitors, Survivor, etc.).

[ecto_one_spengler]

Jeopardy and Wheel of Fortune are family traditions in my family, seeing as my paternal granny liked the latter prior to her passing.

Also used to watch a good amount of Deal or No Deal + Who Wants To Be A Millionaire with my maternal grandparents who enjoy prime time TV goofiness like that. Family Feud and The Price is Right also falls under here!

But personally, I long for a game show that rewards a specific niche rather than truly generalized knowledge. Gimme a show about video games! Gimme a show about celebrating other languages! Something with some variety to spice up the otherwise blandly familiar trivia games.

[mxcatmoon]

Match Game. Loved it! Brett and Charles's banter was legendary. Besides that one, I've never been much for game shows.

[yourlibrarian]

I never watched it but agree that having the right participants can make something even more watchable. Though not a game show, I am extra excited when Ronnie Chieng and Jordan Klepper are paired for a segment on The Daily Show as they are fun together and Ronnie is particularly likely to start laughing.

[adafrog]

I LOVE a game show. I don't have GSN anymore, so I use Pluto and the ones on Paramount+.

[yourlibrarian]

I know that Roku also has a game show channel though I don't know how much is available.

[adafrog]

There is a Game Show "something" that is on th free channels. It has a very similarly color logo, so I think they're siblings. It has older game shows.

[delphi]

Some of my favourite shows are game shows, but I particularly love ones where the contestants are known performers rather than random members of the public. Funnily enough, I was just watching a video today about one of them today, Why Game Changer Works, that goes into how a game show can accomplish something different when both the audience and the show writers know the people who are playing.

Game Changer (a show on Dropout.tv where the game changes every episode and the contestants often have to figure out how the game works on top of winning it) might be my favourite currently airing, but I also enjoy its spin-offs like Dirty Laundry, Make Some Noise, and Play It By Ear.

I also still have a lot of love for What's My Line, which aired from 1950 to 1967 and featured a recurring panel who would have to first guess what a member of the public did for a living through yes-or-no questions and then also guess the identity of a celebrity guest while blindfolded. As with the Dropout shows, a big part of the enjoyment for me is the interactions between funny people who know each other well, and following some of the same contestants from episode to episode, getting to know what they're good at and how they'll react to things.

[yourlibrarian]

Oh that sounds like a fun idea, where the participants have to discover the nature of the game 🙂 I can see why they would need to know the participants though since not everyone's going to be on board for that sort of uncertainty.

And I've only seen clips of What's My Line but I could see why that would be a big draw.

[delphi]

The ones where the contestants really have to trial-and-error it are some of my favourites, including one where it turned out that the only rule was that one player was always going to be wrong. That's the sort of thing that only feels funny and fair when it's professionals having a good time together rather than ordinary people hoping to win money, and it creates the sense that it's more the players against the host rather than the players against each other. (Another favourite is the one where the contestants, aware of this, ended up unionizing. :D)

[yourlibrarian]

Ha!

[executrix]

I'm loving Broadway Jeopardy on YouTube--21 episodes so far! I know somebody who got on the actual TV show, but she got eliminated her first week, alas.

[yourlibrarian]

Aw, too bad but it must have been an exciting experience.

[dirty_diana]

I like Let Me See Your Voice, contestants get six people in costumes and try to guess who can sing well to win money. It's cute and has me surprisingly on the edge of my seat, and isn't mean to the bad singers. I have no idea when to expect it to come on though, so it's just a happy accident when I catch it.

[yourlibrarian]

Sounds like the Masked Singer but I'm assuming without the celebrity participants?

[dirty_diana]

A bit different - it's not elaborate costumes with masks, but folks doing mundane Halloween costume type personas, like "the baseball player" "the UPS guy", etc. The contestant vying for money tries to guess which ones can really sing, they're revealed one by one, and then the one left for the last reveal at the end does get to sing with a celebrity pop musician - they have a different one on each episode helping the contestant guess. (There's clues but realistically it's mostly luck.) I'll be on the edge of my seat waiting to hear how the duet is going to go, lol! Anyway a bit hard to explain apparently, but fun.

[tinny]

Two types:

1) the typical British type of "comedians have fun" show, like QI or Taskmaster, where there are tasks/games, and ostensibly, there's also score-keeping, but it's completely random. Special mention for the only two German members of this category I know: "Alles Nichts Oder" and "Genial Daneben" both hosted by/with Hugo Egon Balder and Hella von Sinnen. You can find clips of both on youtube.

2) shows where people actually have to know stuff, like Jeopardy. Although I don't usually manage to keep watching those for too long, unless there's a second aspect to them that I appreciate. I remember watching French game shows (just French versions of the usual US ones, Wheel of Fortune, Newlywed Game, etc.) as a teen, when my language level was just high enough to be able to follow along and use it as a language learning experience at the same time.

[yourlibrarian]

That first type sounds like a good setup. And yes, I do a daily trivia quiz and I do often find it intriguing to learn new tidbits, but at the same time there's stuff I know nothing about and don't care. There always seem to be questions about the Olympics, for example.