John Neumann from Minneapolis writes…
Hey, Mark. I love your site, of course. I wonder if you have opinions about the various game shows ABC has brought back, particularly Match Game with Alec Baldwin. I love game shows so I'm tickled to see them. They also stick pretty closely to the original rules and stagings, freshening only enough to not look campy.
Still, they remove much of the life of it with heavy-handed editing and obviously scripted jokes. On the new Match Game, they love reaction shots of chuckling celebrities, yet won't trim the stars' writing time.
Alec always has a little crack after he's introduced, when visiting the panel before each game, and when meeting the civilians. It's all robotic. While the loser is being "spun off," he reads the insult into camera. Thing is, they don't need all this. He's funny when he ad-libs.
I guess this is my opinion, not yours, but I'd love to hear what you think.
I think I'm not watching them regularly but I have sampled the new prime-time versions of Pyramid, Press Your Luck, Card Sharks and Match Game. I think they all suffer from sets that are too big and too elaborate. Card Sharks especially is in itself a small, simple game we could play on a card table and it feels overwhelmed on a stage that looks like it should be holding a Boat Show. It's like having a symphony orchestra play "Chopsticks." I also preferred the game played at a faster pace for a half-hour at a time before a studio audience that had less over-hyped reactions.
But apart from one other thing which I'll mention below, it's okay. The host, Joel McHale, adds almost nothing but then the hosts of the old Card Sharks were pretty peripheral to that game, too. On Pyramid, Michael Strahan is more or less interchangeable with anyone else they could have hired…or did since Dick Clark was the M.C. Pyramid suffers from length, a too-high-tech set and its iconic bonus round now seems a bit too easy to win. But there's nothing really wrong with either of these revivals.
Match Game also seems okay to me. I liked Gene Rayburn on the old show. I like Alec Baldwin on this one. I can only take so much of a game where the object is to guess which sorta-dirty word someone will write to answer a question designed to elicit a sorta-dirty response. An hour at a time is too much and the celebrity panel doesn't have quite the same camaraderie of the old Charles Nelson Reilly/Brett Somers/Richard Dawson lineup…but this is pretty much what any decent revival of that game show is going to be, especially if it has to be an hour long.
Actually — and speaking of Richard Dawson — I think the most successful game show revival around today is because of whoever thought to install Steve Harvey as host of Family Feud. There's a little too much Steve Harvey on my TV these days but I like him on the Feud. Apart maybe from Chris Hardwick on The Wall, he's the only host these days who gets called on to ad-lib when the game takes unforeseen turns and he and Hardwick are more than able to do so.
Which brings me to the new Press Your Luck, which I really don't like. I thought the original was just about perfect and they've made it bigger and less organic and whoever's editing it isn't as skillful as the old producer-director Bill Carruthers was in (usually) editing without giving the show an edited feel. I love the idea of a female host but Elizabeth Banks, though wonderful when she has a character to play, doesn't project enough authority as herself.
The first half hour, which more or less follows the format of the old show, is fine but too many of the contestants I've seen seem unaware that there's a genuine strategy involved in knowing when to press and when to pass. All the winners I've seen won mainly by luck and I have limited interest in a game where all you have to do to win is hit a buzzer at the right moment. And then it all falls apart in the new bonus round which has nothing to do with the game show that was memorable enough that they brought it back. It's kind of like Deal or No Deal but — again — with less need to strategize.
My problem with that last half hour is one I also had with the one episode of the new Card Sharks I made it through. Some folks in the game show business are now saying, "It isn't enough to watch some player win big. We need to care deeply about that person and hear what a good human being he or she is and how much love there is in their family and we have to see them hug their family members and cry and talk about how they sacrifice for one another." If you make the bonus round in Press Your Luck, you have to also trot out some friends and/or family members and put some of your emotions on display.
This kinda works with The Wall, possibly because the love between the players is woven into the show from the start…and possibly because Chris Hardwick is really good at saying the right things and not milking it. On the 2019 Press Your Luck, it comes outta nowhere for the winner beginning after he or she wins the first half-hour. Also, you can kind of figure out what's going to happen before it happens just by keeping an eye on how much time is left in the show.
While I don't dislike any of these shows (except the last part of Press Your Luck), I also am not motivated to set my DVR or watch any of them regularly. I'm kind of sad about that because I used to like game shows and now, like so many "reality" shows, they just don't seem real to me.
