Daylight Savings Time

[Dbacksfan12]

Last year, they showed, IIRC "He Said She Said" and "Tattletales?"  Don't have GSN access anymore, wondering what goodies they might unload on us.

[sshuffield70]

It was a TTTT with HSSS last year.

As for this year, we know there's not been an announcement yet.  Then again, how often do they announce these suckers in advance?

[Don Howard]

A special hour-long edition of Kenny vs. Spenny or perhaps a lost episode of Extreme Dodgeball.
But truthfully, I was wondering the same thing last night as I lay in my bed with only my teddy bear for company. Who among us has access to Adlink where this schedule (just one month away now) would be posted?

[CaseyAbell]

There is a "TBA hiccup" on the day DST ends. Don't know if it's just a typo or if something really will go into the slot besides informercials.

BTW, anybody can access the Adlink schedules. Just edit the URL referenced above with the Monday of the week you want to look at. The format must be mm/dd/yyyy, with leading zeros for the month and day if necessary. Right now the furthest the schedules go is the week of 11/15/2004.

Also, Adlink often revises their schedules as they get new info from the networks. So the further you go into the future, the less reliable the schedules get.

Speaking of Dodgeball (a show I happen to like a lot) GSN has posted some information about the second season. It's twelve hour-long episodes without everybody's hated Survivor harpy. They've got a volleyball player to do the sideline stuff. Some of the players from the first season return, including the two best.

Don't know exactly what those percentage increases in ratings mean. I assume they're comparisons to last year's comparable time slots.

[sshuffield70]

The only increases are occurring within the hollow area of your brain.  It gets bigger and hollower every time.  The "experiment" failed.

[CaseyAbell]

Nobody has hollower brains than people who refuse to look at the evidence. I guess Variety's in on the conspiracy, too, when they mention the big year-to-year increase in prime time ratings for GSN during the third quarter 2004. And the accountants at Liberty must also be hollow-brainers when they show the network improving its financial performance significantly in 2004.

If this is a failed experiment, GSN wants more and more failures. You might dislike the network and that's your right, but the hard numbers show GSN is doing pretty well right now.

The network has sure rebounded from the bad ratings it suffered for much of 2003. Talk about an experiment failing...the stuff GSN was showing in prime time for the second and third quarters of 2003 really tanked.

Going forward, the network's long-term health depends on getting into more households. GSN now claims 57 million in household availability, a new high. But that's far short of the 80-90 million the cable big boys enjoy.

IIRC, Cronin told the Prof that his target is 70 million. That seemed pretty unattainable to me when I read it, but now it's looking more doable. GSN has to sustain improvement in younger demos, though, to convince the system operators that it's not just a retirement-home specialty.

[sshuffield70]

You mean were not convincing enough??

Okay, how many people here are under 50?

Male?

And have some amount of means of money?

I think we have a fair amount of posters who fit that profile.  I dare say GSN also has a bunch at their boards as well.

The point is this.......advertisers are so ass backwards that they haven't realized that people of ALL ages and ALL genders and ALL incomes do watch game shows.  Until the conspiracy that says it's old, poor ladies can be broken, it'll remain the same.  Apparently, they didn't get the memo that these old, poor ladies helped create younger fans (male and female) of various means.  TPIR, anyone??  Wheel?  Jeopardy?  I don't see too many poor, old ladies on those shows, do you?

[Jimmy Owen]

What hurts for me is the fact that the programming I like best (apparently) does not perform in the ratings.  My point of reference was my worries when the game shows started to drop off the daytime network schedules one by one until we are left with just TPIR. Sure, soaps are great and bring in younger numbers, but I'd like to see more game shows.  So I wrote off the nets and moved to cable.  FAM and USA were great for game shows, but when they started to sprinkle court shows and movies among the game shows, I got worried that the blocks were eroding.  So I gave up on USA and FAM, which probably are getting higher ratings with their current programming. Casey, any numbers?  It probably doesn't matter, I don't think the game show blocks will return.  When I see programming on GSN that doesn't appeal to me, I tend not to watch it, popular though it may be.  It just makes me think that the strategy for GSN is to get away from the '70s shows I'd prefer to see.

[Matt Ottinger]

[quote name=\'sshuffield70\' date=\'Oct 1 2004, 09:43 AM\']You mean were not convincing enough??
Okay, how many people here are under 50?
Male?
And have some amount of means of money?

I think we have a fair amount of posters who fit that profile.[/quote]
Yes, most of us would fit that profile.  Problem is, there's a grand total of a thousand of us.  Even for GSN, that's an insignificant number.

[CaseyAbell]

So I gave up on USA and FAM, which probably are getting higher ratings with their current programming. Casey, any numbers?

USA's doing fine at number two in prime time and number eight in total day for the latest week available. Fam isn't doing quite as well but still lands in the top twenty on both measures. How this compares to the old days for either network is hard to say, because I can't find real old cable ratings free on the web. It's safe to say that eliminating game shows hasn't seriously hurt either operation, or even dinged them. USA has usually done well in the cable ratings, while Fam probably has improved from the old Pat Robertson era.

As Matt says, using this web board as any kind of representative sample is pretty silly. We're a small, self-selected group of fervent game show fans. While some future TV universe may include so many channels that even the tiniest sliver of the audience can support a channel (as we support this web board) GSN has to deal with today's world. Right now the numbers indicate that the network is dealing pretty well.

And really, I don't see why the current GSN should tick off fans of "classic" game shows, no matter how you define that slippery term. GSN offers a far broader selection of classics than anybody else...many hours each week of older shows. (In fact, it's hard to think of another outlet that runs old game shows for grownups on a regular basis.) GSN doesn't do older material exclusively, and I wouldn't want them to.

But the notion that they're turning away from the classics completely is a figment of the Prof's imagination.