[quote name=\'LA the DJ\' post=\'255904\' date=\'Jan 29 2011, 09:45 PM\']Style-wise GSM (sort-of) tried it with mixed results, but I'm curious what the consensus is around here:
What if a tried-and-true game show format was resurrected exactly as it was? I'm talking sets, monetarily, rules, identical to the original (or most popular version). I know most of us here prefer the originals, but I think with the amount of nostalgia out there something like this could work, possibly well.
We all know that the powers-that-be who own the rights to these formats just love to tinker with everything, but realistically, (and we know most of the GSF crowd would watch) do you think a show like this could be viable?[/quote]
I think it's pretty simple, and something we've said many times. A good format is a good format. They are still playing Jeopardy, Wheel, Price and Feud more or less the same way that they did in the seventies. And for Jeopardy, since the sixties. It's not a matter of slavishly hewing to the original in order to attract a "nostalgia" audience. There aren't enough of us for that to work. The issue is when people who don't understand these games (i.e. a significant number of people working in the industry today) make changes to something so that it's "new" without realizing how badly they're screwing up what made it work in the first place.
Thing is, you're always going to have "mixed results", and the powers that be are always going to have their arguments and we're going to have ours. People say that GSN's IGAS was a stab at a straight panel show <joke here> that failed. I would point to half a dozen things they didn't do right, but even if they'd done it my way, it still might have failed. Was Whammy a significant departure or a still pretty faithful remake? Would it be considered successful? What about Lingo? It's their most successful, but purists like me still wish they hadn't changed some things. And frankly, I find Catch 21 all but unwatchable (unless Adam's on it), but others find it to be a decent modernized remake of Gambit.
Everybody's going to have a different view, but if your question is no more complicated than whether or not we should recreate an exact replica of an original show to draw a nostalgia audience, then the answer is no.