It's 4 a.m.....

[Jimmy Owen]

Someday, "Millionaire" will go off GSN and we'll be wondering why nobody ever rolled tape...

[ilb4ever2000]

I wasn't paying that close attention, but I think Saturday night's "surprise" episode was the same one they showed the night before. Perhaps it's some odd programming glitch...

[Jay Temple]

[quote name=\'1978-Jeopardy\' date=\'Apr 18 2004, 06:17 AM\']

It's the dark period all over again....well sort of.

At least in the dark period, we got to see the $20,000 pyramid [/quote]
 I didn't have GSN during the Dark Period, but I wish I had for two reasons:  $10/$20KP and to see how stupid a show Burt Ludden's Love Buffet was.  (I only know about that show because they advertised it at the end of Rock 'n' Roll Jeopardy!)

[Timsterino]

[quote name=\'cac8383\' date=\'Apr 19 2004, 04:01 AM\'] Ok, folks 4:00am eastern and B&W Overnight is on now. [/quote]
 Looks like it was indeed a glitch.

Tim :-)

[Matt Ottinger]

[quote name=\'Timsterino\' date=\'Apr 19 2004, 05:54 AM\'] [quote name=\'cac8383\' date=\'Apr 19 2004, 04:01 AM\'] Ok, folks 4:00am eastern and B&W Overnight is on now. [/quote]
Looks like it was indeed a glitch. [/quote]
 I don't know what kind of "glitch" would make a rerun of Millionaire just spontaneously appear at four o'clock in the morning for two straight days instead of B&WO.  Another possibility to consider is that they're cutting B&WO back to five nights a week.

[SRIV94]

[quote name=\'Jay Temple\' date=\'Apr 18 2004, 11:02 PM\'] I didn't have GSN during the Dark Period, but I wish I had for two reasons:  $10/$20KP and to see how stupid a show Burt Ludden's Love Buffet was.  (I only know about that show because they advertised it at the end of Rock 'n' Roll Jeopardy!) [/quote]
 Technically BLLB was not a part of the dark period (as defined by the Usenet vets)--not to say that it wasn't a low point in GSN's history.  But the dark period (if I understand it correctly) coincides with the G/T shows not airing on GSN--while the variety got a bit better, it just wasn't the same without the G/T shows permeating the schedule (of course, the first time I had seen GSN was a few months after the dark period ended).

Doug

[Matt Ottinger]

[quote name=\'SRIV94\' date=\'Apr 19 2004, 12:01 PM\'] Technically BLLB was not a part of the dark period (as defined by the Usenet vets)--not to say that it wasn't a low point in GSN's history.  But the dark period (if I understand it correctly) coincides with the G/T shows not airing on GSN--while the variety got a bit better, it just wasn't the same without the G/T shows permeating the schedule (of course, the first time I had seen GSN was a few months after the dark period ended). [/quote]
You're right, what has come to be known as the Dark Period lasted from approximately October 1997 to April 1998, during which time GSN lost the rights to show most G-T series. Ironically, one of the very few exceptions was TPIR.  

There were some bright spots for us fans, because it forced GSN into digging a little deeper into their library and give us shows they wouldn't normally bother with.  Still, the channel -- which was then almost totally dependent on library shows -- was a shell of its former self without the sheer quantity of G-T product to work with.

Burt Luddin didn't appear on the scene until April, 1999.

[aaron sica]

To be very, very anal and technical:

The "Dark Period" began at the stroke of midnight on Saturday, October 11, 1997 with (Zach will correct me if I'm wrong) "The Gong Show". It ended 28 weeks later, at 8:00 a.m. on Saturday, April 18, 1998 with "Child's Play".

I'm usually good at dates anyway, but the Dark Period was literally sandwiched around my birthday (October 10), and my ex-wife's (April 18)..

And as Matt O. said, some offerings that we'll probably not see again were shown..

[JasonA1]

Someday, "Millionaire" will go off GSN and we'll be wondering why nobody ever rolled tape...

Maybe because most of the tape hounds already taped them near-religiously in first run? :)

-Jason

[CaseyAbell]

If anybody still cares, one of the admins on the GSN board has posted that the pre-emption of BW&O was to test the network's new interactive service. The press release on the trial service:

http://biz.yahoo.com/prnews/040420/latu043a_1.html

The admin said that GSN had to put the screens on the air to test the interactive gadgetry. No doubt they selected their lowest-rated hour (except for the infomercials, of course) to run the test.

Also as you might expect, the first show mentioned in the release is...Millionaire. You might call Regis' epic The Show That Saved a Niche Network. Or...Who Wants to Survive on the Fringes of Cabledom?

EDIT: This is verging on Kremlinology or Greenspan-Watching, but it's interesting how the press release balances five traditional studio game shows against the five new non-trad offerings. I was getting a little nervous about Lingo, but it snuck in there as "GSN's most popular word-guessing game." Guess that means Lingo in prime time gets better numbers than Password in the watches of the night.

Off-topic a bit, GSN also ran a press release plugging the finale of the blackjack tournament:

http://www.prnewswire.com/cgi-bin/stories....02154893&EDATE=

Looks like the network is going ahead with the two additional blackjack series previously announced. I like the show, so that's good news for me.

[sshuffield70]

Well, what's the time difference between Hawaii and New York?  IIRC, it's a 7 hour difference.  So, at 4AM, it's 9PM in Hawaii.  That might be another reason.

[tommycharles]

[quote name=\'CaseyAbell\' date=\'Apr 21 2004, 01:06 PM\']

The admin said that GSN had to put the screens on the air to test the interactive gadgetry. No doubt they selected their lowest-rated hour (except for the infomercials, of course) to run the test.

Also as you might expect, the first show mentioned in the release is...Millionaire. You might call Regis' epic The Show That Saved a Niche Network. Or...Who Wants to Survive on the Fringes of Cabledom?

 [/quote]
 Were the pre-Millionaire ratings really that bad? What did they do that killed the ratings, exactly?

[CaseyAbell]

The numbers got pretty awful, allright. I listed GSN's rating history from the old CableWorld site in a post that should still be in the search cache.

Basically, GSN's numbers had been trending flat to down throughout 2003, with a one-time upward blip thanks to the PYL Big Bucks documentary. Things really got ugly in late summer, when the network often fell out of the top 40 ad-supported cablers altogether. (CableWorld only listed numbers for the top forty, and GSN was often nowhere to be found.)

That's why the enormous shakeup in prime time occurred. ALL of the Boden originals except Lingo got banished to the far reaches of the schedule or axed completely. The network paid whatever it took to pry Millionaire loose from ABC's clammy digits, and bet the house on three shows in prime time: the aformentioned Regis epic and proven warhorses Match Game and Lingo.

Voila, as the froggies say (apologies to froggies everywhere). The network bounced back nicely in prime time household count in January and February this year, according to stories in Variety and MultiChannel. The demos were still what you would expect: old, female, lower-income. But at least the network had SOME audience again.

So now they're trying non-trad stuff at 10:00. This doesn't seem to be doing all that great if hints on various web sites are to be believed...with the exception of blackjack, which apparently is getting halfway decent numbers. We await further developments in Days of Our Niche Network.

Oh, on another note, GSN doesn't have a separate Hawaii feed, of course. So they had to put the Millionaire one-screen interactive version up for everybody. I'm sure that's why they picked the miniscule-rated (is that a word?) 4:00 AM Eastern hour.

Now that I mention it, I'm a little intrigued by the one-screen idea. Don't know when, if ever, the experiment will get to my part of the cable woods. But it might make teevee viewing a little less dumb-dog passive. Setting up on a computer to do interactivity is something I'm not interested in, but running things off the remote might be fun.