She was joking, but Griffin’s eyes lit up. “Why not just give them the answers to start with?” Julann mused. On a flight to New York in 1963, Griffin was discussing his worry with his wife, Julann: How could he convince a network to take another chance on trivia? This didn’t sit well with Merv Griffin, a television host, producer, and game show developer for NBC. Having broken the audience’s trust-and inviting a federal law that prohibited the fixing of game shows-the genre all but disappeared. It was all fun and games until 1956, when one contestant blew the whistle, and Congress stepped in to investigate. But with ratings and revenue at stake, producers became hungry for melodrama, so they manufactured suspense by feeding answers to contestants. City streets, Hoerschelmann says, were quiet when they aired. According to Olaf Hoerschelmann, Ph.D., director of the school of mass communication at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock, “One successful quiz show could get a 50 percent ratings share or more-half of all households watching.”Īt the height of the genre’s popularity in the 1950s, Twenty-One and The $64,000 Question became national obsessions. The programs were cheap to produce, with no highly paid actors, and they attracted rabid fan bases-everyday people who could identify with the ecstasy that came from winning a new oven. In the early days of TV, game shows were a network’s secret weapons. But before viewers grew accustomed to shouting answers at the screen, its host and crew had to resolve one nagging question: Was Jeopardy! too smart for its own good? Creating Jeopardy! Trebek no longer worries about job security. “The fact that Quincy was a coroner seemed appropriate,” Trebek would later write. The local affiliate had replaced Jeopardy! with reruns of Quincy, M.E. But instead of seeing himself trot out to greet the audience, Trebek saw Jack Klugman. At the time, Los Angeles was an outlier, airing the show at the decent hour of 3 p.m. Still, he remained optimistic.Īs he and the reporter chatted, Trebek suavely flipped on his TV. Trebek and the producers were pressured to dumb down the program and make the clues easier so viewers wouldn’t feel left out. In several major markets, including New York, Jeopardy! was relegated to a 2 a.m. Programmers knew that established game shows like The Price Is Right and Family Feud could reliably draw a mass audience. And as Trebek had quickly learned, Jeopardy!’s biggest hurdle was convincing station managers that a smart game show deserved premium air time. Now the high-paying trivia contest was being updated for a new generation. Ratings had soared in the 1960s and early 1970s, but the show had also been canceled-twice. (For more on 1 vs 100, read Angel's Surfer Girl blog.) Men in Trees, meanwhile, was down 350,000, to 7.15 mil.At 10, Numbers (with just shy of 11 million viewers) again topped Law & Order (a season low of 9.4 mil).SUNDAYThe only stories this week were NBC's football coverage (Broncos-Raiders) being down almost 4 million (to 9.4 mil) Housewives placing first at 9 but again with a new low (20.02 mil, down 750,000 week-to-week) and CW's transplanted Monday dramas — 7th Heaven (3.15 mil) and Runaway (1.8 mil) — bringing in, across the two hours, nearly the same viewership as the Chris-All of Us-Girlfriends-The Game sitcom quartet, though Heaven was down m.Unfortunately, the program had a checkered history. Ratings: Every-1 Watched 100, Heaven SlipsįRIDAYRiding on the coattails — and them some! — of like-minded lead-in Deal or No Deal (which won the 8 o'clock hour with 11.4 million viewers to Ghost Whisperer's 9.95 mil), the 9 pm series debut of Bob Saget's 1 vs 100 was watched by a mob of 12.55 mil, followed not very closely by Close to Home (11.1 mil).
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