I'm bailing on Gameshow Marathon, a sad attempt by CBS to create a multi-week event. The premise must have sounded great in the meeting: Revive a batch of old, classic game shows and bring in celebrities to play them, the winners of each show advancing to later rounds. At the end, the finalists play a big game for the championship and they win…well, I'm not sure what they win. It was explained but I'm afraid there's a bit of disconnect between the prizes and the contestants' interest in winning them.
At the moment, I'm watching (though not for long) tonight's episode and I see Leslie Nielsen as a contestant on Let's Make a Deal. If there was an appeal to the original Monty Hall version of Deal — and obviously, there was; it was on forever — it was that winning meant so much to the contestants. Going home with a new car seemed like a life-changing event to one of them and that moment on the show was perhaps the high point in his or her life, perhaps the only time the person would ever be, albeit briefly, a TV star. Great…but Leslie Nielsen used to make a couple million dollars a year to star in TV shows and movies. Winning two motorcycles means zip to him and if he doesn't care, why should I?
Later this week, George Foreman is playing. Do you know how much money George Foreman has made off those grills? It's something like a hundred million dollars. I'm sure America is going to be eager to see if George wins a new refrigerator. (Yeah, he'll be playing for a charity and maybe a home viewer but they're barely mentioning that and anyway, that makes the winner even more remote.)
So there's one of the problems with Gameshow Marathon. Another is that the celebrities aren't, for the most part, people we care much about, either — not even Mr. Nielsen who, at age eighty, is sadly showing his age. Yet another is that though hostess Ricki Lake is working hard, she's in an impossible situation. Most of the shows being re-created here — which include The Price is Right, Match Game and Family Feud — had a nice feeling of "family." We tuned in to see people play the game but we also tuned in to see host Monty Hall and model Carol Merrill and announcer Jay Stewart. Gameshow Marathon won't be around long enough for any of that to establish itself.
The audience had been stoked up to an excitement level that seems phony. The show has also been heavily edited. Segments where the game didn't seem that entertaining have obviously been dumped. Edits in a game show may seem like a way to keep things moving but you sense them and they create the feeling that you're not watching reality.
So I'm giving up on the marathon. The first night didn't do all that well in the overnight ratings and I'm betting that after tonight, we'll discover I'm not alone. People wonder why game shows died out in this country and needed million dollar prizes to generate any interest. I think it has a lot to do with a loss of personality among the hosts and celebrities, and that with the fancy effects and editing, any interesting people and/or reality got lost. Let's see if the audience for Gameshow Marathon doesn't get lost, too.