Shows you really looked forward to seeing, but found underwhelming

[johnnya2k3]

If I lived in Australia (and having watched the episodes on YouTube), I would’ve definitely said The Price Is Big W (aka the 2012 TPIR reboot, which was basically one nightly infomercial for their Walmart); in the UK: their recent Supermarket Sweep reboot, which failed to recapture the same kind of magic Dale Winton left behind.

/Leslie Jones owns Rylan anyway

[TLEberle]

But you didn’t live there.

[dazztardly]

The Card Sharks reboot with Joel McHale was a let down. The set looked great. Joel did the best he could with what he had to work with. It just dragged too much.

-Dan

[chargeradiocom]

I guess MG ‘98 would count for me. I wasn’t really plugged into the online game show community at the time and don’t know who, if anyone, carried it in my market. So by the time I’d read up on it, its reputation was already intact. But I’m willing to watch nearly any game show at least once, and can usually find something of interest or entertainment value in it. MG ‘98 was the rare show that I turned off just a few minutes into the episode.

As for shows I saw in real time, I’ll add Al Roker’s run of Celebrity Family Feud. Al seems like a congenial fellow on the Today Show, but his persona really didn’t fit Feud. That said, he didn’t have a very long run at the helm, and even some shows that went on to be legendary now seem a little rough in their first dozen episodes or so. Al was never going to be the showman that Steve Harvey is, but I’ve wondered if he could have grown more into the Feud role if he’d had a bit longer to do so.

Read About It: Remote Control. I never saw it on an actual television - it was canceled when I was one year old. Kris Lane's site made it sound hilarious, and I also spent many an hour playing a version of the DOS computer game downloaded from whatever abandonware site. When the advent of sites like Youtube finally allowed me to watch a few episodes...I would never saw it was bad, but it mostly just felt like a weird 80s relic.

To each their own, but personally it was almost the opposite for me. I grew up in a conservative home where MTV was not exactly banned, but certainly not encouraged, so I didn’t see the show until years later. When I did see it, I really liked it and thought it would have been my family’s kind of show for the most part. I also showed an episode or 2 to my mom, and she liked it.

I will say, though, my family & I are geeks for both music and classic TV. If someone is neither of those, I can see where RC might not have much appeal.

[JasonA1]

Read About It: Remote Control. [...] I would never saw it was bad, but it mostly just felt like a weird 80s relic. Ditto Fun House  - sites like The Fun House Factory made it sound great, but when I finally found it on Youtube, I had to constantly repeat to myself "It's 1988...it's 1988..."

I appreciate the honesty. Are you saying they both gave off heavy "you had to be there" vibes?

-Jason

[aaron sica]

As a child I was obsessed with Bullseye, having seen the pictures of the impressive set in the EOTVGS, then getting to download clips and the theme song on various sites. When I finally watched the show, it was intriguing but lacking. Maybe it was because the first episode I watched had celebrities but it felt like Joker’s Wild tried to make the Fast Forward category its own show, then ironically slowed it to a crawl.

Your turn!

I was 6 when Bullseye premiered. A new game show, from the same people who did TJW and TTD? Sign me up!! However, once I watched it, I found myself cheering for 1 or 3 question contracts. I hated the 5 question contracts as I thought that was entirely too long. And, more often than not, they were the 5 question contracts. Tried to watch it again after 30+ years....Still boring with 5 questions.

As for underwhelming shows........I was excited for "Scattergories". To this day, it's the only game show where I have been so bored watching it that I fell asleep.

[JMFabiano]

The Card Sharks reboot with Joel McHale was a let down. The set looked great. Joel did the best he could with what he had to work with. It just dragged too much.

-Dan

This.  As I keep saying, it was slow where it should be fast, and fast where it should be slow.  As such Joel didn't have much to do. 

I had my hopes up as it wasn't CS2001, of course, and back to traditional Card Sharks, but...yeah. 

I had an open mind about each version of current Family Feud, think I was only let down by Anderson and Harvey (yes, really...) 

Kinda cheating, but when I heard CBS was bringing back Password, I was like cool.  Then stuff leaked about how Million Dollar Password was played, etc. and little by little I tapped out.  Best thing about it was the Betty episodes. 

I should have known what I was getting from Snoop Dogg, but didn't like his TJW similarly. 

[DoItRockapella]

Read About It: Remote Control. [...] I would never saw it was bad, but it mostly just felt like a weird 80s relic. Ditto Fun House  - sites like The Fun House Factory made it sound great, but when I finally found it on Youtube, I had to constantly repeat to myself "It's 1988...it's 1988..."

I appreciate the honesty. Are you saying they both gave off heavy "you had to be there" vibes?

-Jason

It seems to be an unpopular opinion, but I guess so. Again, I'm not calling either show bad. Had I been born maybe six years before I was and been able to watch them on TV as a kid, I probably would have loved both and have lots of nostalgia for them now.

[JasonA1]

Read About It: Remote Control. [...] I would never saw it was bad, but it mostly just felt like a weird 80s relic. Ditto Fun House  - sites like The Fun House Factory made it sound great, but when I finally found it on Youtube, I had to constantly repeat to myself "It's 1988...it's 1988..."

I appreciate the honesty. Are you saying they both gave off heavy "you had to be there" vibes?

It seems to be an unpopular opinion, but I guess so. Again, I'm not calling either show bad. Had I been born maybe six years before I was and been able to watch them on TV as a kid, I probably would have loved both and have lots of nostalgia for them now.

I don't think it's an unpopular opinion per se, it's just not been voiced here, which is why I welcome it.  I think your last sentence gets at something a lot of fandoms tend to gloss over -- the power of WHEN you got into something. The reason we probably haven't heard "Remote Control was eh" is because most people who talk about the show were probably fans of it during first run.

For better or worse, I was a kid who didn't like stuff that openly pandered to me. While Fun House is just before my time, when I finally caught up with it in subsequent years, I thought it was trying too hard to be cool. Double Dare was more in the sweet spot for me, and looking back, they discovered rather quickly (IMO) that trying too hard wasn't going to work for them. They seemed to aim more for making themselves laugh, and it worked all the same.

-Jason

[Blanquepage]

Bullseye was literally the earliest audio-visual memory I recall from my childhood, and I loved watching the reruns as a kid too. As an adult, my issue is with the end game that especially dragged on when the contestants tried for the 10-spin jackpot.
I'd still like to see reruns pop up again somewhere, though.

[PYLdude]

I should have known what I was getting from Snoop Dogg, but didn't like his TJW similarly.

I feel the opposite. I rather enjoyed Snoop’s take on The Joker’s Wild and if there was any show that benefitted from extra chrome, as I’ve said at least once before, that was it. Snoop Got It.

With that said, there were at least one or two things I had problems with that I just couldn’t ignore. I don’t know what purpose Jeannie Mai served, especially considering a) TJW never needed a co-host and b) she sucked at it just as well. (YMMV.) Either way, cutting her out of the production was for the better.

[PYLdude]

The Card Sharks reboot with Joel McHale was a let down. The set looked great. Joel did the best he could with what he had to work with. It just dragged too much.

-Dan

(apologies for double post)

See, I just thought he was another piece in the morass that was the Card Sharks revival. The pacing sucked, the extra chrome sucked, the hosting was extremely meh. Wanted to like it, didn’t.

[whewfan]

For me, that would have to be TJW 1990. The first format was mind boggling for me. I watched, and I thought... wait a minute... three players, buzzers, dollar figures instead of categories...and ONE Joker?! this ISN'T the TJW I remembered! I did kinda like the bonus game but the notion that you could only win ONE prize made it a bit cheap.

Then they made some tweaks with the format. Categories on the wheels, three jokers... it felt a LITTLE more like the classic game, but everything else remained the same. Still, I liked it enough to keep watching. Pat Finn said on Wink's site, regarding the pilot, that he had shot another pilot where he was joking around with the players more, and Richard Kline advised him not to do so. I'd like to see that pilot to see the approach Pat originally had. Kline would have similar orders for Gene Rayburn on Break the Bank, and it was very evident Gene didn't like that at all.

Another show I thought was underwhelming upon first viewing... Doug Davidson TPIR. It just felt... too different. However, today I have a very different opinion on it. If you can put aside the classic game that Barker did for years, I think Doug's version now wasn't really so bad. Doug was consistent, looked like he was having fun, and he was able to bring out the good in some contestants. In some ways i think he was better than Drew. The showcases also had that Wolpert flair (Jay Wolpert produced, of course) that I think the current version as well as Barker's later years lacked.

[beatlefreak84]

Ooh, fun topic!  I actually have answers for both questions:

Shows I read about but was really underwhelmed to see:

Double Dare (Trebek):  I first read about this in the EOTVGS, and it looked like an intriguing show; isolation booths?  Alex?  Big money?  I'm there!  I finally got to see it when it was a Faux Pause Pick on GSN, and ended up...meh about it.  I liked the bonus round (and still do), but the main game just doesn't do it for me.

Play the Percentages:  I never got to see this show when it was on USA, but read about it in the EOTVGS.  YouTube made it possible to see it when I was in grad school, so I watched an episode from both versions (couples and individuals).  Other than getting some chuckles out of Geoff and Judge Von Erik, the game itself was pretty boring.  Even a massive jackpot win just wasn't that exciting.  This is one show I've honestly never really had any inkling to go back and watch more of, in either format.

Shows I looked forward to premiering but was underwhelmed:

Temptation and Crosswords were my immediate answers, but I'm going to give the edge here to Crosswords.  By all measures, Crosswords *should* have been more successful, but a broken game format, robotic host, and bonus round wins that just didn't really seem all that exciting did in my excitement for the show pretty quickly.  Somebody on this group was kind enough to record the first 4 aired episodes for me on a DVD, and while I'm thankful to have had that, I was way less excited about Crosswords after seeing it than Temptation.  Honestly, if Crosswords was People Puzzler, I probably would have watched it almost every day.

Anthony

[chrisholland03]

I remember getting very excited when USA started plugging The Joker's Wild and Tic Tac Dough in the early 90s, thinking it would be the Barry/Cullen and Martindale/Caldwell versions.  That was a disappointment.