A lot of television game shows of the past had a rotation aspect with their main game, and their bonus games. One night, a show might come on start it’s time slot, and two contestants might start the “main” game. Three days later, that same exact game show, different episode, might start it’s time slot with just one contestant in the bonus round.
Along with this circumstance, you would often have the host / Emcee kill time. Match Game 7x is an example, Card Sharks, and other game shows of the kid 70s and 80s are also culprits.
Is this problem of running out of time to fit in segment parts of the show “solved” ? Does it still happen? What was the circumstances to change this? What were some of the last shows to do this?
Isn’t/wasn’t Who Wants to Be a Millionaire like this? On the ABC version with Regis, the hour would sometimes run out when a contestant was still alive, and the contestant would just come back at the beginning of the next episode. (I haven’t watched the syndicated version in a long time, so I don’t know if this still occurs.)
Good question! The daytime versions of the games such as Pyramid and Password carried over, IIRC. Didn’t Wheel carry over, when you still had to go shopping with your winnings? Back when Pat was just a pup?
It’s a tiny bit frustrating to watch Match Game reruns these days, and get into a game, and find the contestant just vanishes, and the next episode is from weeks to years later.
On the other hand, i don’t know those people, so I don’t really care how well they did. And really, no one watched Match game for the game. We watched for the panelists.
I think each episode of Wheel has always been self-contained: there would be the regular rounds followed by the bonus round (later they added the toss up rounds). They wouldn’t have contestants come back the next day to play the bonus round, for example. But the winner did get to come back and play the next day’s game with two new contestants, but everyone would start at zero the next day. There was a limit on how many days a contestant was on. I think it was three or maybe five.
Family Feud solved this by putting in double and triple rounds. If a segment was taking too long, they would just throw in a triple round. This frustrated me because most of the time all of the regular rounds really didn’t count and all that mattered was who got the triple round.
Wheel of Fortune just plays rounds until they run out of time. Sometimes (usually) they have a speed-up round when there isn’t enough time to play another full round. Pat spins the wheel for the speed up round. They used to show Pat landing on bankrupt and lose-a-turn, in which case he’d spin again, but in modern times they edit those out and only show Pat landing on a money space.
And, in modern times, the shows aren’t live. They do edit them for time. (“Portions of this show not affecting the outcome of the game have been edited.”)
On TV Tropes this is called the “Golden Snitch.” It is, as you might imagine, done purposely with game shows to keep people watching instead of turning them off, already knowing the outcome. Not all game shows do this, Jeopardy is a big exception, but it is fairly common.
The term used among game show fans for this phenomenon is “straddling”, i.e. a game straddles two episodes (occasionally more).
Several of the major hit game shows over the years have never straddled, either because rounds are played until time is up or because each episode is structured to be self-contained. Examples are The Price is Right (both the current and original runs), Let’s Make a Deal, Jeopardy!, Wheel of Fortune and Family Feud.
The various versions of Pyramid have typically not straddled, but during the 1970s run there were occasionally long, long tiebreaker rounds that would force the second bonus round to the beginning of the next episode.
Panel games such as What’s My Line, I’ve Got a Secret and To Tell the Truth simply played rounds until time was up or were structured to be self-contained.
Game shows that used best-2-of-3 matches often straddled, as did shows with rounds that could run very long or very short, depending on the skills and luck of the contestants. Examples include Password, Card Sharks, High Rollers, The Joker’s Wild and Tic Tac Dough.
Match Game straddled in its daytime runs during the 60s and 70s, but could be tweaked not to (extra rounds, more editing). The original daytime Hollywood Squares straddled, but was easily adjusted to be self-contained (play until time was up).
There seems to have been a trend away from straddled game shows by the late 1980s – I can’t think of any American ones between the end of Card Sharks in 1989 and the beginning of Millionaire in 1999.
There has also been a trend away from returning champions, and shows that don’t bring players back don’t straddle very well. Besides, a show without returning players that doesn’t straddle has the added advantage of being able to air the episodes in any order.
Tic Tac Dough especially, and quintessentially in the time of Thom McKee, as whenever one of his shows ended, it was basically a cliffhanger ending that equaled the best soap operas, as we never knew what Thom would do next.
And really, no one watched Match game for the game. We watched for the panelists.