(First reply on the new board.)
YOUR first reply, or do you actually think you were the first one? Cause it definitely isn't the latter.
If I may, I'd like to add one more question; perhaps it will help answer yours. IIRC the first half seemed to end as though it were its own show, then the second half began as a "regular" Feud episode would begin. And Combs would not make any reference to the game in the first half. I'd like to know if that was by design or coincidence?
Well, the first game was always between two new families and the second saw the winners meet the current champions. So if your station bought the second half episodes only, it still looks like returning champs vs new challengers (even though those challengers played a "play in" to get to that spot). I'm assuming Combs didn't make the reference to make those episodes flow better for stations who only bought the second half of the hour. What they did when calculating money at the end of the show could have confused some viewers, though.
To answer Mark's question, it was probably that CBS didn't have much else to put on, and probably didn't want to give the half hour back to the stations. Looking at Daytime TV, there isn't much network programming that was only 30 minutes long. The Bold and the Beautiful was a niche soap because it was (and still is) the only half hour soap, and that was probably doing well for them the way it was, so they didn't want to extend it. As cheap as game shows are to produce, the thought was probably that it was cheaper to give Feud the extra half hour and ax it in a year than to make any drastic moves to the daytime lineup.
