If you want your show to be seen its still the job of the big 3. There maybe hundreds of channels to choose from but people still go back to abc CBS and NBC.
I think there are more than a few people in cable who\'d beg to differ. I mean, Mad Men? Breaking Bad? Those shows are being seen by a lot of people. Granted, maybe their sheer numbers aren\'t what they might be if the shows were on network and not cable, but they\'re definitely being seen and talked about. And even shows from the big 4 (can\'t leave Fox out) are showing up on Hulu and Netflix, playing on equal footing with cable shows.
On \"pretty much forced to watch it:\" what, your Mom went all Joan Crawford and tied you to the couch when Card Sharks came on?
Or maybe you\'re saying, correctly, that the options just weren\'t there like they are now. In most areas, you had your big 3 and maybe a UHF independent or two. Maybe you had a good enough antenna to pull signals from another city to expand your options. Limited number of channels = limited choice. Now that there are so many-hundred other channels on cable and satellite, and Roku, Apple TV and Xbox with all the channels they offer, viewing options have multiplied exponentially and the audience has fragmented accordingly. There\'s just not enough of an audience for a good-ol\' daytime game show block anymore. Don\'t get me wrong, there is an audience for it, but it\'s so small (and probably so old-skewing) that it a big-four network can\'t financially justify sustaining it.
On GSN only running classics: don\'t see it happening. Even TV Land, cable\'s home of retro TV, realized there\'s only so much money to earn from running shows like Gunsmoke and The Jeffersons 425 times a year, so they started running new original shows like Hot In Cleveland. Result: highest ratings ever. And they still run older shows - albeit not as old as before. Maybe GSN will get there. America\'s Bible Challenge got decent ratings. Maybe something will come along that will do at least as well. But they need to keep the new stuff coming so they don\'t burn out the old stuff they have, or run out of appropriate old stuff to acquire.
