Alternate Daytime Emmys

[Kevin Prather]

The three fastest successful runs seemed like the best way to go for qualification; I understand that they wanted an easy way to cull the field and skirt continuity for syndication, but to penalize players after they already have to overcome bad writing and nitpick-y judging seemed like bad form to me.

Not to mention in the first season, they did not have the option to give the clues.

[JasonA1]

When I first heard the GSN Pyramid's idea with each 7-out-of-7 adding $5,000 to the next Winner's Circle, I thought it was a nice evolution. But watching day after day, it made the individual rounds feel like a series of failures during which they were keeping score. i.e. - well, you didn't add $15,000 to your Winner's Circle, but you did manage 17 points along the way. (Oh, and you won the game.)

For me, the same kind of feeling permeated the Donny Pyramid. Maybe it's knowing the old version too much. But, put side by side, the Donny version had an especially anxious energy. The classic Pyramid afforded you about 4.28 seconds to work on each answer; the 6-in-20 format only allows 3.33. As Travis alluded to, some of the problem on the Donny show could have been in what words were chosen, and especially what order they played.

An Osmond Pyramid had about 20 minutes of show in a half hour slot, while the Strahan version is right around 21:30. Based on that, there's a case to be made they literally didn't have time to play the old game in 2002. But I wonder what the end result could have been with the Donny version if they approached the runtime problem in a different way.

-Jason

[Dbacksfan12]

When I first heard the GSN Pyramid's idea with each 7-out-of-7 adding $5,000 to the next Winner's Circle, I thought it was a nice evolution. But watching day after day, it made the individual rounds feel like a series of failures during which they were keeping score. i.e. - well, you didn't add $15,000 to your Winner's Circle, but you did manage 17 points along the way. (Oh, and you won the game.)

Let me ask you this, because I agree with you on both points that were made.

What if they started teams at $0 and then awarded $1,000/point for a go at the WC, with a $5k bonus if they racked up a perfect score?  If I was producing, I wouldn't mention the $$ until the bonus round itself..."In the main game, you scored 18 points, so you're playing for $18,000.  Here is your first subject..."

[JasonA1]

Any way you slice that broad idea, it creates a scenario in which the very last round of the game is compromised. If you make the game win as satisfying as possible -- by ringing bells the moment a team achieves a winning score -- you've left some viewers wondering why they can't play out the round to earn the maximum Winner's Circle money. If you always play out the last round, regardless of the score, now you've got a lot of game wins where the team falls short of earning all the money, but still wins the overall game. "Oh, you lost out on [$x], but let's go to the Winner's Circle!" Those moments, when created naturally by the bonus cards, were tolerable. As a daily, guaranteed feature of Pyramid? Not my cup of tea.

-Jason

[Loogaroo]

When we did Pyramid for one of our charity Throwdowns, we formatted it thusly: the default Winner's Circle value was $10,000 (in the form of a $10 donation to charity), but if you won with a perfect score of 21, you played for $25K/a $25 dono. If memory serves, there were at least 6 or 7 of the 20(!) games played that evening that went for the max value.

[TimK2003]

How much commercial time did Donnymid have in a 30-minute episode versus a Strahan 30‐minute episode? 

If Sony didn't try to re-invent Pyramid in the Donny Osmond years, I would think they easily could've had gameplay darn close to the prior versions the Stewarts cranked out.

At least Sony learned from their mistakes and incorporated some improvements to save time, like the best "overall" time tie-breaker, when warranted.

[JasonA1]

How much commercial time did Donnymid have in a 30-minute episode versus a Strahan 30‐minute episode?

Ahem.

An Osmond Pyramid had about 20 minutes of show in a half hour slot, while the Strahan version is right around 21:30.

As you were.

-Jason

[TLEberle]

At least Sony learned from their mistakes and incorporated some improvements to save time, like the best "overall" time tie-breaker, when warranted.

This is certainly a take.

What if they started teams at $0 and then awarded $1,000/point for a go at the WC, with a $5k bonus if they racked up a perfect score?  If I was producing, I wouldn't mention the $$ until the bonus round itself..."In the main game, you scored 18 points, so you're playing for $18,000.  Here is your first subject..."

Notwithstanding that there's forty years worth of inertia behind the 10, 20 and 25 numbers, this really isn't something you want to bring up just before the stagehand flips the 50 box. It works for Showoffs because you play a bonus to multiply the money from the first phase.

I think this was a circle that The Pyramid was never going to be able to square. Even in an entire half-season of Pyramid '02 there were only six $25,000 winners at most, and sometimes just four. (and we know we can thank the deck-stackers for that.) GSN wasn't ever going to have the prize fund to pay regular bonus wins of $25,000 in a single attempt so they hid it behind the perfect game, and a new generation of players who were figuring their way through the game again. Maybe they could have done the 10-then-25 of the old days but most end games would have a murderer's row in that top triangle of 400-500-750 so they don't find themselves in the problem of too many bonus wins in a period.

My point is that any solution was going to either come off as penny pinching (The $5,000 Pyramid would never fly) or extremely difficult to pull off and contestants who maybe get two tries in a day. That's one of the sacrifices to be made to clear the runway for a legacy property to get back on the air.

Perhaps we can look at it as The Pyramid walked so $100,00 Pyramid could jog.

[Otm Shank]

At least Sony learned from their mistakes and incorporated some improvements to save time, like the best "overall" time tie-breaker, when warranted.

I think overall producers are recognizing the reformatting errors preceding the genre's collapse didn't expand the audience and pissed off the built-in audience. I really could not get into the Osmond Pyramid because the front game was just too frenetic (among other things) so I didn't watch.

I also realize that the old formats are now going to be templated, edited, and with added histrionics, but I do think they could have made more effort on the tiebreaker. The flaw I see is that a player who gives an illegal clue or struggles with just the last word of a round is rewarded.

I would have preferred that they display letter choices in the top 3 boxes of the front-game pyramid. This would speed up the selection, which would not rely on careful enunciation, and give the opposing team a choice. Count up without the constraint of 30 seconds, maybe allow a backup word for a pass/illegal clue. Hone in on the exact time in tenths of the first utterance of the 7th word, and count down. Trim all the preliminaries before the Winner's Circle and maybe a small amount editing to either half of the episode and you have a more satisfying resolution.

Ties in anything are exciting, but the lack of a true tiebreaker or even a meaningful reveal is a real missed opportunity.

However, it breaks the template. They also don't want Strahan to change his pace, they would rather edit, which would get too choppy. And any histrionics would have to be abbreviated as they quickly dump to commercial. But, I'm sure they tested it all out and couldn't do it to their satisfaction, as much as I'm not in favor of it.

[Loogaroo]

The big issue with relying on cumulative time as a tiebreaker is that not all subjects are created equal. There was almost always one subject per game where the answers were a bunch of Up/Fast/Black/Happy/etc. words that could easily be dispatched with opposite clues. Or they'd be fed the topic "describe the words in the titles of Steven Spielberg movies" which would lead to clues like "Schindler's..." "Saving Private..." "The one with the shark", etc. Either way, clue-giving was so trivial for that specific category that whichever team chose it was bound to outpace the other team.

Cumulative time also becomes problematic when five subjects are played normally and one of them is played without the context of the common thread that binds the answers. Even though a lot of modern Pyramid categories tended to have tenuous links - there was a lot of "words that come between (X) and (Y) in the dictionary" - any context is useful, and one team doesn't have it for 1 of their 3 turns.

[JasonA1]

Playing devil's advocate, I think it's at least comparable to what happens over an entire game of the classic version. There could be a team that's a lock to get 21-out-of-21 (as we saw a lot of in the '80s), provided they pick only regular subjects. But in one game, they happen upon the Dreaded All Names Category, and now they have 18 total. Their opponents are a team for whom 18-out-of-21 is their normal ceiling. So on this day, they tie with their usually better rivals. And in a game where they create the tie, they get to pick first, and that day, they pick a tiebreaker set that they ultimately do faster. Or conversely, even if they don't get to pick, perhaps the better team just happened to get more difficult answers in their tiebreaker.

That's all to say there's at least an argument that some variables can cause one team to easily win the "total time" tiebreaker, just as some variables could cause a better team on paper to lose on the classic show.

-Jason

[Loogaroo]

Funny you mention the names category, because to my untrained eye it seemed like teams on Strahan Pyramid didn't struggle with names to nearly the degree that folks in the '80s did. Maybe it's because the names used in the '80s could be rather arcane (Rona Barrett leaps to mind) or that teams weren't regularly going 21-for-21 anyway so the names category didn't impact the scores to the same degree, but either way teams didn't seem to get tripped up by names in the modern version as much.

[MSTieScott]

Isn't that because on the current version, the names that need to be conveyed are usually just a first or last name? Name categories aren't nearly as intimidating when you only have to get your partner to say ANGELINA or SPEARS.

[Kevin Prather]

Isn't that because on the current version, the names that need to be conveyed are usually just a first or last name? Name categories aren't nearly as intimidating when you only have to get your partner to say ANGELINA or SPEARS.

And to that end, when the answers are all last names, it's as simple as leading with the first name.

[trainman]

Maybe it's because the names used in the '80s could be rather arcane (Rona Barrett leaps to mind)...

Since I'm in the middle of (re-)watching the series on Hulu: Rona Barrett was well-known enough to carry a clip-show episode of "Moonlighting" as herself (interviewing the characters).