Game Show Fans 50 Greatest - Results

[SuperSweeper]

My last ten were: Supermarket Sweep, Hot Streak, Hollywood Showdown, Dirty Rotten Cheater, Talk About, Chopped, Late Night Liars, Remote Control, Million Dollar Mind Game and finally Estate of Panic, because by golly I just enjoy it.

Ooh, Talk About.     I've just started getting into it.  For some reason, I had never checked it out before.  It's good stuff.

I've never seen an episode of our version of Dirty Rotten Cheater.  It's never popped up on YouTube.

[SuperSweeper]

My top few choices were mostly the same as the aggregate, but the rest of my list was quite a bit different than most. 

The highest-ranked show that I excluded from my Top 50 was Double Dare, at #23.  I've never really been a fan of kids/family games, which is odd because I grew up watching a ton of Nickelodeon.  I was just a bit too young for Double Dare's run, though.  I did watch quite a bit of Double Dare 2000, but it didn't make the same impression as the original did on a lot of folks on here. 

The one kids' show that I did watch quite a bit of was Figure it Out.  I still have the home game!  God bless you, Lori Beth Denberg. 

I'm probably the person most responsible for getting Debt (#25 on my list) and Battlestars (#26) in the top 100.  Debt has really grown on me over the past few months, and Battlestars was quite fun - even if it was essentially Hollywood Triangles.

Also - no love for Dealer's Choice?  I had it in my Top 50, which is pretty high - but I'm surprised that it wasn't in the overall 100.

[MikeK]

My bottom 10:  To Tell the Truth (not a fan of panel shows), Dirty Rotten Cheater, Face the Music, Let's Make a Deal (do not like the current version), Scrabble, Wipeout 80s, To Say the Least, Remote Control, @midnight (and this is so far off my top 50 now, as it doesn't have the appeal it had just a few months ago), Late Night Liars at 50.

I was probably the main reason Celebrity Name Game hit the top 100.  I had it at #19.  I looked at it from the overall entertainment factor--Craig Ferguson is a fantastic host, the spontaneous humor is always fun to watch, and the game really improved by leaps and bounds from season 1 to seasons 2/3.

I'm also at fault for Travis having Late Night Liars on his list.  He was running out of shows and cribbed my list as a cheat sheet.

[PYLdude]

Late Night Liars is an interesting case. Was it good? Certainly one could make the argument and I would because I enjoyed it. But do you consider the fact that the show only aired for one and a half weeks to be a hindrance or not? To me, that's what would've prevented me from including it had I considered it (and that's more of a case of "at this point in the list, I'm tapped out and can't think of anything else" than anything).

I had Downfall on my list as the last one in. Call me crazy if you must but I felt the concept of a race against time to prevent everything you could win, as well as yourself, from going off the side of a building to be a fascinating one.

[MikeK]

Million Dollar Mind Game had 6 shows, yet it landed in the top 100.  Grand Slam, another in the top 100, had the same 8 episode run as Late Night Liars.  Quality > Quantity.  And your number 50 had even less shows--five.

[Jay Temple]

My heart skipped a beat when I saw Pyramid at #1. For some years, I've said that and Jeopardy! the twin pinnacles of game shows. J! is the greatest straight-quizzer, and Pyramid is the greatest non-quizzer.

[clemon79]

Call me crazy if you must but I felt the concept of a race against time to prevent everything you could win, as well as yourself, from going off the side of a building to be a fascinating one.

I liked the show because it was CHOCK FULL of content for an hour's time (and I like Jericho, period, and anyone who disagrees is a STUPID IDIOT <clap, clap, clapclapclap>), but having to disclaimer the conveyor belt at the top of every show really ruined the gimmick.

/armbar

[Matt Ottinger]

Late Night Liars at 50.

Bless you.  I just couldn't pull that trigger.

[TLEberle]

Late Night Liars is an interesting case. Was it good? Certainly one could make the argument and I would because I enjoyed it. But do you consider the fact that the show only aired for one and a half weeks to be a hindrance or not? To me, that's what would've prevented me from including it had I considered it (and that's more of a case of "at this point in the list, I'm tapped out and can't think of anything else" than anything).

I had Downfall on my list as the last one in. Call me crazy if you must but I felt the concept of a race against time to prevent everything you could win, as well as yourself, from going off the side of a building to be a fascinating one.

You just answered your own question--obviously we don't consider it a hindrance if we gave points to it, and you gave points to Downfall, a similarly short lived series.

It's clear to me that we devoted the last five or ten spots on our lists to quirky/off beat shows that we enjoy that we know aren't going to chart but we want to show some love to them, and to talk about (har!) and share memories of them.

[Chelsea Thrasher]

Miscellaneous thought/opinion:

My top fifty included both Gong Show and Love Connection, and I'd intended to include both Survivor and Amazing Race but both got brain-glitched off the final version of my list.   Plus a series whose most famous run was outright rigged in Twenty One, a comedy vehicle for Groucho Marx (You Bet Your Life), and quite a few shows to have their first runs after 1995 (Debt, 5th Grader, Cash Cab, The Chase, the two reality competitions I'd intended to include but accidentally drafted out, Deal or No Deal, etc).   The same list where I omitted forum favorite Whew - a very fun game whose evangelism for the show stops and starts within this community and that ultimately I get frustrated when I think about the format of. Blocking is at *such* a disproportionate advantage, and adding celebrities to the mix was not a good thing - almost never is.  Is there a show? Is there a game involved, even a nominal one - whether that game involves trivia, or dating, or figuring out how much cocaine Chuck Barris could do between tapings?  Congrats, it's a game show.  That's my definition.

Because ultimately, a list like this is both wholly subjective - both open to broad/narrow determinations of "what is a game show" as well as the definitions of "greatness" (format? cultural relevance? personal enjoyment?) and additionally won't ever be a conclusive list, representing just a few dozen opinions within a walled garden. 

Besides longevity, I think in deeper ways, the top three are what they are - and probably will be for a long time - because in so many ways they're the pinnacle of their respective types of shows.  Jeopardy is the definitive quizzer for all but a select few, while you can make an argument for Password ultimately Pyramid has proven the more versatile, durable, and often enjoyable, and Price is Right is a sterling "game-as-variety-show", where there's a rotating mix of often wildly different segments, unified together by the emcee and show-as-structure, driven as much by the personalities of the players and the fun factor of the mini-games than the show as a whole.

Know what I'd really, genuinely love to see: Throw open greatness voting.  Game show fans on Facebook, on Reddit, on show-specific boards like Golden Road and J! Board and Buy a Vowel.  And if they can't think of fifty, then let them do twenty or twenty five.   I'm genuinely interested to see what a greatest/favorite list looks like when left immune to twenty years of feedback loop and to folks who maybe don't have the entire history of the genre on VHS/DVD/HD. (The lengthiest and most sincere and most enjoyable real-world conversation I've ever had about a game show? Talking with a bunch of 35+ co-workers at a hotel about Remote Control.  Who remembered it by name and would almost all - and we're crossing every demographic here - buy DVDs or iTunes releases if offered.)

[clemon79]

It's clear to me that we devoted the last five or ten spots on our lists to quirky/off beat shows that we enjoy that we know aren't going to chart but we want to show some love to them

That's how Brexit passed.

[TLEberle]

or figuring out how much cocaine Chuck Barris could do between tapings?  Congrats, it's a game show.  That's my definition.

I'd certainly watch this over Three's a Crowd in a walk.

[clemon79]

on show-specific boards like Golden Road and J! Board and Buy a Vowel.

Problem here is that unless you get a sufficiently large sample size (and you won't; there just aren't enough of us), you have now guaranteed that these three shows are the top 3. And now the exercise isn't interesting, because I don't care about what the fourth best game show that doesn't have its own community is.

[Chelsea Thrasher]

on show-specific boards like Golden Road and J! Board and Buy a Vowel.

Problem here is that unless you get a sufficiently large sample size (and you won't; there just aren't enough of us), you have now guaranteed that these three shows are the top 3. And now the exercise isn't interesting, because I don't care about what the fourth best game show that doesn't have its own community is.

I should have really specified from the beginning, but tend to stick to more train-of-thought type discussion:  When I say I'd love to see this, I'm talking theoretically.  Because yes, if you did open it up right now, you might pick up some folks from LearnedLeague and Facebook, but a lot of the voting would come from those show-specific sites.  Though, if those are the shows that have sustained and vocal interest enough to have their own communities, perhaps they ARE the greatest shows. And if that happens, Jeopardy wins. All the Price and Wheel fans vote J! #2, and all the J! fans and trivia folks give the A&Q game the #1, and it's no contest.

I'm more imagining a scenario where you have the Chris Lemon and Matt Ottinger and Chelsea Thrasher votes next to the votes of all of my LLama friends, next to votes of my friend from work who has a DVR timer for Match Game and watches it in binges, next to the votes of people who do passionately love and know about the genre, but don't participate here because they're, well, an asshole - next to the vote of, say, a Bob Boden or Aaron Solomon type who's in the industry, but is at best only loosely tied to this segment of the fandom in 2016 and who obviously has other things going on in his life. Even the person who's never heard of Bullseye but has a Tivo at home with every episode of 5th Grader and Cash Cab.  What do they think the greatest games really are?

Purely as a thought exercise, I'm utterly fascinated by what would happen to the list as the scope of voting expands beyond the slowly shrinking walled garden of the Game Show Forum née alt.tv.game-shows

[PYLdude]

Re: the point regarding the last spots being for obscurities: don't doubt it at all and I'd wonder just what else garnered votes.

Far as my question goes I appreciate the answers but it was more in a scientific sense that I was asking. There's a lot of stuff that's relatively short lived out there, and quite a bit of it was decent TV. It then becomes a matter of where you stand as to whether or not a show like Duel, Million Dollar Mind Game, Grand Slam, Downfall, Dirty Rotten Cheater, Late Night Liars, etc. was good enough for you to give it a vote. With my list, I had a lot of stuff on it so it was a little more difficult as I got to the end to fill in gaps. Certainly Dirty Rotten Cheater and Late Night Liars were worth votes.