I watch Family Feud almost every day because its air-time always coincides with my break during my work and whatever network its on is the default for my break room TV. During this time without fail every single episode is a white family vs a black family. Occasionally you’ll get a black family vs a black family or rarely a hispanic family vs a black family but the white family vs black family is the standard.
My question is, what’s the main cause behind this, demographics or studio interference? Georgia demographics are 55% non-Hispanic white and 30% African-american so that does lead some credence to just statistically the most probable match-up. But then again Family Feud under the current host Steve Harvey makes me curious if there’s a push to attract more African-american viewers and this is one of the results.
You missed a couple of hosts in between him and Steve Harvey. Richard Karn (Al from Home Improvement) and John O’Hurley (Mr. Peterman, Elaine’s boss on Seinfeld) have also hosted it.
In the movie Quiz Show, which is about scandals concerning the 1950’s TV show Twenty-One, it’s claimed at one point that that TV show was deliberately trying to have as many of the match-ups of the two competitors on each episode be a “typically Jewish” competitor vs. a “typically Christian” competitor. It would take a while for me to explain what 1950’s TV audiences thought typically Jewish people vs. typically Christian people were like and why the audiences then thought this was important. Perhaps something similar is being done by the producers of Family Feud. They may have noticed that because Steve Harvey was the host, this increased the number of black families trying out for the show to the point that the proportion of families was about half black and half white. They said to themselves, “Hey, let’s make the show implicitly a black vs. white competition. We’ll never mention it and we’ll always keep the competition between the families friendly, but the audience will unconsciously think of the show this way. Audiences love to have one competitor on a show be the one they cheer for.” Remember, the job of the producers is to make the show as popular as possible without it getting sued for anything.
Steve Harvey has had some cultural cache with black people since the 90’s. So I think, because Steve Harvey is now the host and because it’s now filmed in Atlanta, more black families are signing up than in previous incarnations, leading to a lot of those bi-racial matchups.
I don’t think they just cast from the Atlanta area. Since Steve Harvey is a comedian the families are picked to be good foils for his humor and he has most experience and is probably most comfortable with black people.
Yeah, I bet Harvey wants it that way. He gets some funny rapport there.
As an related aside, I was watching one the other day where he was doing the intro to the families, and he was reading the cue card, he said something like “and on this side we have the…” and then he froze like a deer in the headlights, looked over at them (they were African-American), looked at the sign behind them, and said “… the Black family!” It was pretty funny.
I had no idea this was a thing. Has it been a thing for a long time? I thought daytime shows were for stay at home wives back in the day. Now, any stay-at-home workers and so forth.
Is there any evidence game shows skew towards a black audience?
I suspect that game shows are fairly popular among retirees.
Good question. It looks like there are significantly more African-American game show hosts than there used to be.
My WAG answer to the thread title’s question is that they’re trying to appeal to as large and diverse an audience as possible.
I have no proof but it seems like young to middle aged black people are a target market for many of these shows. Not the only market, but a target one. Snoop has a game show. Labron produces a game show. Cedric was a host of Millionaire. Steve Harvey has Family Feud. Jamie Foxx has Beat Shazam. Michael Strahan is hosting the reboot of Pyramid. These are all top notch entertainers and many of these shows are prime time.