The Game Show Forum
The Game Show Forum => The Big Board => Topic started by: mmb5 on July 17, 2010, 06:39:54 PM
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Been very busy so I haven't caught an episode until today. Looks like yet another way to abuse the concept of the money ladder and extra chance after extra chance. Which led me to wonder...
Is it now a cultural thing reflected in game shows that in order to fail you have to fail repeatedly? 50s shows with money trees, no second chances. If you were wrong -- you lost. Everything. In school -- you failed -- no social promotion.
Nowadays -- second chances, panic buttons, helps and safety zones. Real life -- social promotion, "it's society's fault" and repeated extra chances.
Another difference: Early shows -- primarily female adults as contestants, commercials were targeted towards adults. Nowadays -- contestants <35, because advertisers want them and nobody else.
Any other cultural differences that you have noticed?
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In all of the episodes, a total of $25,000.00 cash and no prizes have been won. I don't think that is the fault of the way the game is set up, but more the caliber of contestants who bleat "Pass!" without even having a guess. I don't think that being clipped to a pulley 100 feet above the ground can be entirely to blame for people getting zero right before panicking out.
I think more than "society's fault," I think that the current situation is "Millionaire's fault." They set the paradigm in 1999, and we're riding it because no one wants to deviate. Greed deviated and scared away teams from having a go at the big bucks, instead opting to bail on $200k and $500k. How interesting would Millionaire be without the lifelines? If you've never heard of the saying that is shown in the $300 question, well, you're just screwed, aren't you. That's what a lifeline does, it saves your bacon.
What if Millionaire had no lifelines, no safety points and you had to decide to play before you saw the answers and questions, and once you saw the question, you had to answer? (Besides Bob Stewart laughing his ass off.) It would be boring as hell. People would quit once they had built up a few thousand dollars.
To break away from the shackles of lifelines, safety and Shouty McSobstory as your contestant, it will take another coming of someone like Jay Wolpert who is willing to have a punt on something wacky and untried, and it'll have to be a smash hit.
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[quote name=\'mmb5\' post=\'244380\' date=\'Jul 17 2010, 06:39 PM\']Been very busy so I haven't caught an episode until today. Looks like yet another way to abuse the concept of the money ladder and extra chance after extra chance. Which led me to wonder...
Is it now a cultural thing reflected in game shows that in order to fail you have to fail repeatedly? 50s shows with money trees, no second chances. If you were wrong -- you lost. Everything. In school -- you failed -- no social promotion.
Nowadays -- second chances, panic buttons, helps and safety zones. Real life -- social promotion, "it's society's fault" and repeated extra chances.[/quote]
Did the 50s shows offer consolation prizes of any sort, even if it was nothing more than a year's supply of detergent from the sponsor? Nowadays, most game shows offer nothing (maybe airfare and I'm not completely sure on that anymore), so if you fail, you get the Nelson cackle of the night, and you have to find your way back home. Temptation didn't even bother to spring for the $50 or so that a second/third place contestant would've made.
Granted, in the latter case, it would be silly to fly to California or NY without a return trip ticket or gas in the tank.
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[quote name=\'fostergray82\' post=\'244401\' date=\'Jul 17 2010, 09:16 PM\']Did the 50s shows offer consolation prizes of any sort, even if it was nothing more than a year's supply of detergent from the sponsor?[/quote]
According to The Museum of Broadcast Communications (http://\"http://www.museum.tv/archives/etv/S/htmlS/$64000quest/$64000quest.htm\"), if you reached the $8,000 level on The $64,000 Question, you received a Cadillac as a consolation prize regardless of what else happened.
Temptation didn't even bother to spring for the $50 or so that a second/third place contestant would've made.
Except that Temptation contestants received "lots of love", and you can't put a value on that.
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[quote name=\'Fedya\' post=\'244405\' date=\'Jul 17 2010, 07:15 PM\']Except that Temptation contestants received "lots of love", and you can't put a value on that.[/quote]Wanna bet? :)
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[quote name=\'Fedya\' post=\'244405\' date=\'Jul 17 2010, 07:15 PM\']Except that Temptation contestants received "lots of love", and you can't put a value on that.[/quote]
Knows the precise cost of "lots of love" (http://\"http://img529.imageshack.us/img529/4602/godfather7dz.jpg\")
/also familiar with the difficulty inherent to his occupation
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[quote name=\'clemon79\' post=\'244407\' date=\'Jul 17 2010, 09:41 PM\'][quote name=\'Fedya\' post=\'244405\' date=\'Jul 17 2010, 07:15 PM\']Except that Temptation contestants received "lots of love", and you can't put a value on that.[/quote]
Knows the precise cost of "lots of love" (http://\"http://img529.imageshack.us/img529/4602/godfather7dz.jpg\")
/also familiar with the difficulty inherent to his occupation
[/quote]
You win.
Pertaining to the subject of this thread, I was going to say something about "breaking the walls down" and building a new format without using the same formula, then I saw this and had to bow down. I can't top that. :)
While the formula is tried and true, what is wrong with doing just a simple quiz show, where reward is based on skill and a wrong answer results in a substantial penalty (read: Game Over)? Oftentimes, I miss those days.
The Inquisitive One
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I don't necessarily buy the argument I'm about to make, but with the shows of the moment and the recent news and whatnot, I see reasoning behind it.
I don't think the Male 18-34's actually want to watch game shows.
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[quote name=\'mmb5\' post=\'244380\' date=\'Jul 17 2010, 06:39 PM\']Is it now a cultural thing reflected in game shows that in order to fail you have to fail repeatedly? 50s shows with money trees, no second chances. If you were wrong -- you lost. Everything. In school -- you failed -- no social promotion.
Nowadays -- second chances, panic buttons, helps and safety zones. Real life -- social promotion, "it's society's fault" and repeated extra chances.
Another difference: Early shows -- primarily female adults as contestants, commercials were targeted towards adults. Nowadays -- contestants <35, because advertisers want them and nobody else.[/quote]
Several points of order...
First, the "need to fail repeatedly" is something that can be found in some of the 1950s (and, counting radio, earlier) game show. "Break The Bank" allowed one false answer, "Big Surprise" losing contestants (IIRC) kept a percentage of their winnings, the preliminary rounds of "Name That Tune" were heavily coached, the pay scale on "Two For The Money" made it difficult to go home with nothing, and contestants on "You Bet Your Life" were guaranteed (if memory serves) $25.
Which leads to the second point: What sort of game shows are we considering in this discussion? The issue at hand is that the "contestant versus the house" model used by most current game shows is one that was fairly dormant in the United States between the 1950s and the late 1990s. Can anyone here name a program of that nature that had a significant amount of success in the interval? The gap in time is significant, as it makes a discussion of the evolution of that style difficult, compared with, say, the "contestants versus one another" style of gameplay.
Third, I find connecting this to trends in society suspect, in part because some of the comparisons aren't as abject as this would suggest (for instance, the "society's fault" style of criminology dates to the early twentieth century, and I've seen references to social promotion in the 1930s). Shifts in society certainly are demonstrated with game shows, but care must be taken, as it can be too easy to use a few unrepresentative examples to make a point.
Fourth, to bring up the elephant in the room, game show producers (and program sponsors) of the 1950s didn't want their programs to become a half-hour of failures. Is the surface probability of failure negated at all by the fact that many of the programs in question were, by various means, offering "invisible" assistance?
Finally, to address the last quoted paragraph, while a full answer to this question is impossible (I doubt we could recover everyone who was ever a contestant on any game show in the United States), a viewing of a large representative sample seems to suggest that game show contestants were equally male and female (or, if anything, skewing slightly male) during the prime-time era, and that the "female shift" is connected to the genre's move to daytime programming. Anyone want to do the statistical survey needed to answer this question?
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I think this topic is being way overthought. Michael Davies wanted to bring back The $64,000 Question and had been shopping it around as The $640,000 Question. In order to embellish his game he added lifelines. Immediately it becomes de rigueur for every game, enjoying the glow of the success that WWTBAM had, to have its equivalent of lifelines. I think it's as simple as that.
If these shows were really a reflection of society they wouldn't be asking questions about King Henry VIII, they would be asking questions about Mel Gibson's rant and Lindsay Lohan's legal woes, or things you should have learned in the fifth grade.
Somebody reading this should hook up with Harvey Levin and develop The TMZ Game.
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[quote name=\'clemon79\' post=\'244407\' date=\'Jul 17 2010, 10:41 PM\'][quote name=\'Fedya\' post=\'244405\' date=\'Jul 17 2010, 07:15 PM\']Except that Temptation contestants received "lots of love", and you can't put a value on that.[/quote]
Knows the precise cost of "lots of love" (http://\"http://img529.imageshack.us/img529/4602/godfather7dz.jpg\")
[/quote]
I said "lots of love", not "lots of sex". ;-)
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[quote name=\'Fedya\' post=\'244420\' date=\'Jul 18 2010, 07:19 AM\'][quote name=\'clemon79\' post=\'244407\' date=\'Jul 17 2010, 10:41 PM\'][quote name=\'Fedya\' post=\'244405\' date=\'Jul 17 2010, 07:15 PM\']Except that Temptation contestants received "lots of love", and you can't put a value on that.[/quote]
Knows the precise cost of "lots of love" (http://\"http://img529.imageshack.us/img529/4602/godfather7dz.jpg\")
[/quote]
I said "lots of love", not "lots of sex". ;-)
[/quote]
LMAO! "Pimpin' ain't easy!"
Okay...seriously, if that doesn't qualify for "lots of love"...How about THIS (http://\"http://blog.oxygencreator.web.id/wp-content/uploads/2009/08/fat-woman-sex.jpg\")?
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[quote name=\'chris319\' post=\'244417\' date=\'Jul 18 2010, 02:57 AM\']If these shows were really a reflection of society they wouldn't be asking questions about King Henry VIII, they would be asking questions about Mel Gibson's rant and Lindsay Lohan's legal woes, or things you should have learned in the fifth grade.
Somebody reading this should hook up with Harvey Levin and develop The TMZ Game.[/quote]
Actually, I would argue that current WWTBAM sort of does that now with one or two questions per stack. It's a daytime show pretty much now, and the writing reflects that.
And thanks all for reminding me of some of the 50s consolation prizes. I would argue that the phone-in era of WWTBAM and $1M Password were typical front/bouns game structures, albeit with a really long bonus game. Current WWTBAM and the other shows pretty much now drop that conceit entirely, and it's back to being you vs. the house.
As far as contestant makeup between then and now, I give the following:
NYSI -- usually 3 female/1 male or 4 female
MG and Pyramid -- you would see 2 females often, you would rarely see 2 males.
60s Temptation -- Every episode I've seen has been all-female
Early TPIR -- usually 3 female/1 male
I realize I probably went too hyperbolic when I said primarily female. Many shows were always one each. But I would guess that it would be at least 60/40 female. A lot of my evidence is probably gone though. Look at the attempts made to make WWTBAM more equitable in the phone era. It ended up changing the nature of the show.
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[quote name=\'chris319\' post=\'244417\' date=\'Jul 18 2010, 02:57 AM\']Michael Davies wanted to bring back The $64,000 Question and had been shopping it around as The $640,000 Question. In order to embellish his game he added lifelines.[/quote]
Pardon me if I get picky with this. As I understood it, Michael Eisner was the one who wanted to see a revival of The $64,000 Question. Davies tried for many years to develop the show as $640kQ under the original game's format but couldn't get it to work right. It was only after he was given a tape of the UK's WWTBAM (a format that fixed Davies' issues by adding Lifelines and allowing contestants to see the question before making a decision to walk away) that he abandoned his project and chose instead to produce an American version of the British show.
And it was CBS who attempted to produce The $1,064,000 Question in the wake of WWTBAM's success, but because the formats were too similar, it never happened.
Dean
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[quote name=\'mmb5\' post=\'244380\' date=\'Jul 17 2010, 05:39 PM\']Is it now a cultural thing reflected in game shows that in order to fail you have to fail repeatedly? 50s shows with money trees, no second chances. If you were wrong -- you lost. Everything. In school -- you failed -- no social promotion.
Any other cultural differences that you have noticed?[/quote]
Look at the more recent hit, "Deal or No Deal." There, it's almost impossible to fail. "Are You Smarter than a Fifth Grader?" My, that sets a low bar. "Million Dollar Password," where you actually play a game with ability required, fizzled out.
The bigger cultural difference is not only that audiences want to see people just like them, it has to be just like them but worse. They won't watch anybody just like them but worked hard and cultivated an amazing knowledge of boxing.
"Jeopardy" is the last holdout of the earlier era, where we look at Ken Jennings as a normal guy, but heavens, is he smart. Perhaps the canniest move Merv had with "Wheel of Fortune" is making sure the contestants wouldn't get the puzzles before the folks at home. Look what'a back in the daytime: Not "Press Your Luck," where they ask questions and there's a teaspoon of game strategy. No, it's "Let's Make a Deal," and somehow that's even less cerebral than the original.
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Pardon me if I get picky with this. As I understood it, Michael Eisner was the one who wanted to see a revival of The $64,000 Question. Davies tried for many years to develop the show as $640kQ under the original game's format but couldn't get it to work right. It was only after he was given a tape of the UK's WWTBAM (a format that fixed Davies' issues by adding Lifelines and allowing contestants to see the question before making a decision to walk away) that he abandoned his project and chose instead to produce an American version of the British show.
You know more about it than I do. I don't see how you can work on such a cut-and-dried format for years and not get it right.
And it was CBS who attempted to produce The $1,064,000 Question in the wake of WWTBAM's success, but because the formats were too similar, it never happened.
Was that the one produced by Jay Wolpert which Les Moonves is rumored to have walked out on in the middle of a run-through?
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As far as contestant makeup between then and now, I give the following:
NYSI -- usually 3 female/1 male or 4 female
MG and Pyramid -- you would see 2 females often, you would rarely see 2 males.
60s Temptation -- Every episode I've seen has been all-female
Early TPIR -- usually 3 female/1 male
I realize I probably went too hyperbolic when I said primarily female. Many shows were always one each. But I would guess that it would be at least 60/40 female. A lot of my evidence is probably gone though. Look at the attempts made to make WWTBAM more equitable in the phone era. It ended up changing the nature of the show.
There is one episode of '60s Temptation in the trade curcuit with a male contestant - in fact, Art even states that it was the first time a male had been a contestant. I think the show was in its third week by then.
Match Game 7x only had two males compete together once - and that was when one of the males became the contestant with the most wins in the history of the show - I think he won about 12 games before finally being defeated.
I only saw two males together on Pyramid about three times - once in one of the $50,000 version tournament weeks; once with two blind contestants on a 1985 episode, and another on a John Davidson episode tournament week.
As far as male/female ratio, I can offer this: based on what I've seen on GSN and remember from watching all these shows since the early '70s; in the '50s and '60s it was roughly 50-50 whether primetime or daytime. Starting in the '70s and going right through to the late '80s, several shows had mostly women contestants - some have already been mentioned above, but others included Super Password, Let's Make a Deal, Wheel of Fortune and Card Sharks (although two men did occasionally play each other on that show).
I really wonder why the change starting in the early '70s? The only thing I can figure is that it was mostly men who worked during that time and women were home more often and made up the majority of the audience. I guess they figured women would rather see other women playing rather than men. To me, what does it matter? It's almost as any male who tried out to be a contestant on any of those shows during that time was at a disadvantage.
During the '90s when things started to change (i.e. more women in the work force and more men on shift work) you started seeing more males on shows like Price is Right. I think Jeopardy had more males right from the '84 debut.
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[quote name=\'Ian Wallis\' post=\'244454\' date=\'Jul 18 2010, 06:14 PM\']Match Game 7x only had two males compete together once - and that was when one of the males became the contestant with the most wins in the history of the show - I think he won about 12 games before finally being defeated.[/quote]
GSWitch's nightmare come true.
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I don't think that our game shows necessarily mirror the dumbening of society, or mirroring it, even. They're fun to watch, and to make it fun to watch, you have to lower the bar to allow people to participate.
Who today would want to watch some yahoo displaying his specialized knowledge on opera, or rocketry, or the mating habits of the condor? What if the difficulty of Jeopardy! clues was such that the $2,000 clue from yesterday became the round one $200 next week, and the difficulty went straight up? My guess is that the ratings would take a nose dive. Even if I don't have a clue about a category, I can still say "hey, that's kinda neat, I had no idea."
It is fun to be right, to be told "good job" even if by proxy. Even $64k Question had the questions for tens of dollars that allowed a contestant to get his feet wet, shake out the cobwebs and to expunge the nervousness. And I would make the claim that knowing about boxing back then could be similar to the Celebrity weeks that Millionaire used to hold, in terms of type of knowledge.
I don't think we're getting dumber as a country, but I don't think we want to watch the tippy top of our society pondering complex equations and reciting Shakespearean sonnets, we want to be able to play along, to say "Haw, I knew it before THAT guy!" and so on. If we wanted to watch the off-the-chart smart people being smart, we'd have College Bowl as a league on par with minor league baseball.
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[quote name=\'TheInquisitiveOne\' post=\'244409\' date=\'Jul 17 2010, 11:23 PM\']Pertaining to the subject of this thread, I was going to say something about "breaking the walls down" and building a new format without using the same formula,[/quote]
That explains their choice of host.
[quote name=\'Ian Wallis\' post=\'244454\' date=\'Jul 18 2010, 06:14 PM\']I really wonder why the change starting in the early '70s? The only thing I can figure is that it was mostly men who worked during that time and women were home more often and made up the majority of the audience. I guess they figured women would rather see other women playing rather than men. To me, what does it matter? It's almost as any male who tried out to be a contestant on any of those shows during that time was at a disadvantage.[/quote]
Wouldn't the simplest explanation be that more women were auditioning to be contestants than men?