4) Maybe I'm reading into this too much.
This one.
Making too big a deal of it? Sure. But he might actually have some semblance of a point on this one.
The episode numbers for all of the episodes they currently lease are shown in the PDF guides. If it were one of those ~200 episodes GSN leased, it stands to reason the episode number would be provided. GSN's scheduling of the show following the most recent cycle-through is been a little unusual anyway - the show was taken off the schedule for several months despite being consistently the network's highest rated older show. This time, instead of cycling back to the beginning of the run, they're jumping back to several months into the lease, airing a couple of weeks, then jumping back to *June 1986*, close to the end of the leased block.
Unless something's changed in the last couple of years, most shows tend to be leased for either a certain period of time, and/or a certain number of broadcasts on-the-air. Most of the shows being aired between the end of the most recent airplay cycle and the "New" episodes listed starting 5/7 happen to be shows that got skipped over at least once for various reasons. It's quite possible that GSN has used their allotment of airplays on their current $25,000 Pyramid lease, and so given the choice between paying to continue running the 1985-86 episodes and paying a similar amount to run new episodes, they've opted for the latter.
GSN has run Sept. 1982-Sept. 1983, Sept. 1985-June 1986, and Nov. 1987 to the finale, and as far as I know they have the details for all of the above logged in their system. As far as I know, GSN's PDFs appear to just be a printout of their scheduling system,
If GSN doesn't have the episode details for the "New" episodes, it's probably either episodes they haven't previously broadcast and don't have the information logged for, or else they don't have the leased finalized and are using it as a placeholder until they know what they're running (though, if it were the latter that's typically marked "TBA")
