I was wondering what the deal was with the 13 week return of $25,00 Pyramid by CBS in the spring of 1988 after Blackout failed. Did they know all along it would just be a place filler until Family Feud was ready? I'd heard that they brought it back at fans' request, but why bring it back for only 13 weeks if the fans may be upset when it's pulled again. It was nice to see it back as they needed programming, and they could have just thrown on a sitcom rerun or something.

I read somewhere that CBS wanted to premiere Feud right after Blackout was cancelled, but it wasn't quite ready, so they brought in Pyramid, I guess as a placeholder.

Don't quite remember where I read that, and I'm prolly way off. :-P

Well, as BF-G said, I also am of the belief it was just a placeholder for "Feud" until it was ready. Which, of course, resulted in Pyramid getting bumped for "Feud" for the second time.

As for a sitcom rerun, in thinking back to 1988 as to what CBS was offering, perhaps "Kate and Allie" or "Newhart" may have made for a good placeholder rerun. I can't think of any other sitcoms that were on CBS in 1988 that would have been on long enough to strip 5 days a week for plenty of episodes.

Come again?

I'm not sure what the logistics of getting a show "ready" are, but the syndicated "Feud" was being offered to local stations (the NBC O&O'S in particular) as early as December of 1987. LBS took out trade ads with Ray Combs picture for the NATPE convention in January of 88.

Let's play a game called "TV Executive For A Day".

You are a daytime TV network executive in the 1980s. You want "Blackout" off your schedule but your desired replacement isn't ready to go. What do you do?

a) Cancel "Blackout" and order 13 weeks of "Pyramid" knowing that you're going to cancel it and replace it with "Family Feud", thereby risking your "first-refuser" status with the packager who will take his next potentially big hit to Burbank first?

b) Put on a pilot which you didn't like when it was made and you don't like now?

c) Put on a sitcom and forget about game shows?

d) Put "Blackout" on week-to-week renewal until the desired replacement is ready?

Mea culpa.

I fixed my post. :)

If you watch the last CBS "Pyramid," you'll notice that Dick's farewell speech was "punched in." Why would that happen if they supposedly had a finite number of shows contracted? Had the ratings been there, I believe the show would have continued.

Would e) Show reruns of "Blackout" until Feud is ready be a viable option?

Since the entire reason for making a change is because Blackout isn't getting the ratings you want, I would think the answer to that question would be no.

What's funny is that according to some Nielsen's I've seen, Pyramid & CS were pulling the exact same ratings (both of them being pretty lousy) as of June 1, which is about the time that CBS would've made the decision to replace Pyramid with Feud.
Personally, I just wonder why CBS kept Card Sharks as long as they did, since from what I've seen, it was either getting beat by $OTC or later Concentration.

Tyshaun

Perhaps part of the original April premiere plan for Feud was to have x amount of episodes already in the can (say 4 weeks of episodes). However because of whatever glitches there were, there many not have been *any* episodes in the can by April.

Since Pyramid was already cranking out $100K versions at CBS, they could always tape a few extra eps a day under the $25K brand until Feud was ready to go.

My guess is that Feud finally had some eps taped already by June, but not enough in the can to have the original x-week buffer zone. But CBS said we'll roll with what you got, and then they told Pyramid last minute that they did not need any more $25Ks.

Might that scenario ticked off Dick Clark & Bob Stewart? Sure. But if you looked at the amount of shows they'd tape in a weekend (20+ shows), taping a few less shows in a weekend was probably a welcome relief.

One of these days I will have to get my back issues of Variety in front of me and straighten all this stuff out.

It's not in the license agreement, so the answer is "no". Plus, you're going to rerun episodes which are only 13 weeks old?

What were you smoking when you wrote this and why would you need four weeks of shows in the can, speaking as someone who has taped shows on Saturday which aired the following Monday morning?

Granted, it's five years later, but didn't NBC pull that trick when SCRABBLE93 debuted (showing reruns like six or seven weeks in)?

Doug

They sure did. So did its companion program--Scattergories. There were two weeks of repeats from late March to early April. These repeated telecasts must've been a late decision as on the Scattergories show that played on April 15th, host Dick Clark mentioned that it was April Fools' Day. The last three weeks of those two series were repeats as well. Family Secrets also played reruns toward the end and I believe Caesar's Challenge was presenting encore telecasts early into its brief run.

It was. There were two rerun weeks in late summer, including Labor Day week. There was another before the new bonus game debuted in November, and the last episodes NBC ran in Jan 1994 were reruns.

I wonder if they couldn't get access to the showroom to stockpile enough episodes so they had to do reruns to allow themselves to get some in the can for airing.

Having said that, I did see about two weeks worth on USA that I never saw on NBC - so go figure.

It was also easier to have more Pyramid episodes since presumably the set was still up and they would have still been taping the syndicated $100,000 Pyramid.

[Todd Newton]

Stop! at "GO BACK 7 POSTS" to...

"Since Pyramid was already cranking out $100K versions at CBS, they could always tape a few extra eps a day under the $25K brand until Feud was ready to go."

[/TN]