So I'm Watching Donwfall...

[chris319]

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?

[Ian Wallis]

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.

[J.R.]

[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.

[TLEberle]

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.

[Mr. Armadillo]

[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?