Labor-intensive Series

[alfonzos]

My main quarrel with Celebrity Name Game is how little thought goes into the episodes. The game is derivative of Pyramid and the subjects (at least in the episode I saw) are names to be found in the tabloids. It must have taken the producer the better part of an afternoon to come up with a season’s worth of material. I could have more fun with my own friends and come up with more diverse material.

This made me think of other shows which might require a minimum and maximum effort of producers. Having never worked on the actual production of game show series, this would be conjecture.

Minimum effort:
The Face is Familiar (second format) – Cut up publicity stills of famous people. That seems pretty easy.
Beat the Odds – Once the game board using with the spinning letters has been built, all you need is someone standing by with a dictionary to verify responses.
Dealer’s Choice – Like Beat the Odds except the theme is gambling; not wordplay.
Pay Cards! – Choose twenty cards for each game. That seems simple.
Temptation (1967) – All you need are prizes for each round.
Password: TOS – The Oxford Dictionary lists over 170,000 words classified as common. A small fraction would suitable for gameplay. Witness that “cozy” is used as a password three times on the DVD set. Granted, the producers did make an effort to make interesting combinations of celebrities with passwords. It was fun to see Bob Denver being stumped by the password “skipper,” a word he says dozens of times on each episode of “Gilligan’s Island” and eventually a modestly endowed actress will have to give clues for “voluptuous.”

Maximum effort:
The Gong Show – Auditioning acts for a daily show must have been a Herculean task.
Everybody’s Talking! – The book “Short-lived Television Series” by Westly Hyatt recalls how much trouble editing the films were.
Don Adams Screen Test – The producers had to make sets to duplicated two movies each show and edit together the outtakes.
It Could be You! and Truth or Consequences – The logistics of performing reunions in the days of live television must have been a nightmare.
To Tell the Truth – Having to find an interesting person and coach two other people to be that person day in and day out must have been quite the burden.
Play Your Hunch – Which was basically To Tell the Truth with objects. It doesn’t surprise me that this is the longest running G-T property that has never been revived.

What are your thoughts?

[TLEberle]

My main quarrel with Celebrity Name Game is how thought goes into the episodes. The game is derivative of Pyramid and the subjects (at least in the episode I saw) are names to be found in the tabloids.

Except that they aren't. There's five categories ten deep that all share a defining characteristic.

There's plenty of reasons to not like Celebrity Name Game and I'm sure you would agree with them, but this is stretching too far.

[BrandonFG]

Password seems simple to do on the surface, but I'd think there's the searching for words that play well on TV, and figuring out whether they can be stretched out for ten descriptions, or simply two. If the latter, you have potentially boring television.

Wheel puzzles also seem simple enough, even more so until about the mid-90s, when the producers started adding gratuitous extra words and calling routine (read: mundane) stuff an "Event"*. I've said before that Vanna's first puzzle, "GENERAL HOSPITAL", would now be "EMMY AWARD WINNING SOAP GENERAL HOSPITAL", so I think finding a way to get a challenging enough descriptor makes things a little more difficult, even if they do serve as clues to the puzzle.

Honestly, I would think most word games are still going to be difficult to write for. Throwing a bunch of random words or names together doesn't mean the job is easy. I remember writing words for someone's Pyramid game years ago...cobbling seven of a particular anything that are also easy to describe is tough. Same goes for six good Winner's Circle categories.

I imagine Deal or No Deal couldn't have been too difficult. :-P

/*Calling it "What Are You Doing?" doesn't make it any less silly

[TLEberle]

words that play well on TV,

Thank you for mentioning this. A game show is meant to be watched by an audience, so attention must be paid to how the material will work to the home viewer (Pro Tip: having random yokels solve an entire crossword puzzle in thirty minutes will have a success rate comparable to having other random yokels doing improvisational comedy with a professional troupe.) Wheel of Fortune must strike a balance between players never giving up control and not being able to put letters on the board. Family Feud games should have different subjects and the lower half of the board should still be answers where you do the V8 forehead slap when they're revealed.

Having played my share of internet games, it's not an easy thing to do. When the material is good it is a blast. When it is badly done it is like having teeth pulled, and it is folly to assume that a game show's material just miracles itself out of nothing.

[chris319]

A game show is meant to be watched by an audience, so attention must be paid to how the material will work to the home viewer

You know more about game shows than 99.999% of all people in or out of the game show business.

[Kniwt]

Maximum effort:

Any time on The Cube when the contestant doesn't get all 500 balls of Expulsion on the first attempt.

[Marc412]

Quiz shows, especially ones like Jeopardy! and The Chase where they ask more than 100 questions an hour, are pretty labor-intensive too.

[Marc412]

Maximum effort:

Any time on The Cube when the contestant doesn't get all 500 balls of Expulsion on the first attempt.

They could just use a vacuum to pick them all up, then pour them into the box again.

[PYLdude]

Quiz shows, especially ones like Jeopardy! and The Chase where they ask more than 100 questions an hour, are pretty labor-intensive too.

I worked on a quizzer that was basically a Jeopardy derivative with a lightning round for a local college. You wanna talk about labor intensive, here ya go. We played with five categories the whole game, five questions each in the first two rounds and fifteen for the lightning round. That's 125 total questions, a good chunk of which went unused because only thirty were used in the lightning round and the main game never seemed to make it to the end before we called time.

[Fedya]

That's what the Jeopardy categories "Leftovers" and "Potpourri" are for. 

[Chief-O]

I've always thought of "Now You See It" and how difficult it must've been to put together the boards for each round. You'd have to include multiple answer words, plus all the surrounding letters and things......not to mention words occasionally blending with other adjacent words.

[clemon79]

I've always thought of "Now You See It" and how difficult it must've been to put together the boards for each round. You'd have to include multiple answer words, plus all the surrounding letters and things......not to mention words occasionally blending with other adjacent words.

Easiest way to do that would be to build your board of word chains, and then pick out which ones you want to write clues around. Honestly I don't think it would be that hard for someone decent at wordplay.

[Unrealtor]

I'm somewhat curious how The Joker's Wild and Bullseye compared to other trivia-based shows. I assume they did a lot of recycling, but I also figure that they had to have a lot of material ready to go for each game just in case the contestants kept going back to the same category over and over.

[BrandonFG]

In addition to creating enough questions for either show, I imagine overwriting the questions was a task as well, being they could get kinda verbose...especially when a new Chevette was on the line. Now that you mention it, I do wonder whether the writers compiled a couple dozen questions for the often-used categories (i.e. "Faces in the News").

I imagine Tic Tac Dough was a little tougher to write for, given you had to provide several questions for nine categories, in case of a shuffle. Then, write several questions for nine more categories, being the show straddled. Of course, this leads me back to my point about having an arsenal of material for repeat categories...

Also on the more labor intensive side, how about the Nick version of Double Dare, with all the cleaning up? Marc Summers' OCD notwithstanding, that had to be an interesting show to prepare.

[TLEberle]

I imagine Tic Tac Dough was a little tougher to write for, given you had to provide several questions for nine categories, in case of a shuffle. Then, write several questions for nine more categories, being the show straddled. Of course, this leads me back to my point about having an arsenal of material for repeat categories...

Note that on Wink's desk you can see two rows of cards, pink and blue. For every vanilla category you need questions for the outer boxes and the "tougher" ones for the middle. Plus the questions for the various red boxes as well. So, yeah, for a show where the questions were about as hard as a lay-up on a seven-foot hoop they certainly needed a bunch of them. On Bullseye you could have any of eight categories come up at one time, and even if one question was all you needed to get over the finish line you still need to fulfill the contract, so there's that too. I don't recall who it was or what the total was, but somebody here mentioned how deep the stacks were on Joker's Wild.