I've read on a few sites, like Curt Alliaume's GS 1975, that it was believed that one of the reasons why "Money Maze" was cancelled rather quickly was because the maze itself was a monster, taking a full day to construct for a taping and another 2 days to strike.

Do you think, if a permanent (affordable) set had been built for MM, it would have had a longer run?

Or were there more outside circumstances working against the show that would have forced it to be cancelled anyway?

It just wasn't 'that' great. Nick was fine, and the front game was okay, but how well can you play along with people scurrying along in a maze?

That said, and union issues aside, I don't understand why they couldn't put up the maze, tape 5 eps a day for 5 days, and then strike it...you'd certainly save a lot of hassle that way....

Then again, if it were a Bob Stewart production.......

Nick was doing a daily talk show in Cincinatti, so it might have been a logistical hurdle to have him be in NYC five days at a time. Not to mention pulling George out of grade school to attend the tapings. :)

I think poor clearance by the ABC affiliates was the biggest problem.

I'm pretty sure poor clearance was the biggest problem. I watched the show every day when I got home from school, but I lived in the NY area, so of course we got the show.

Another thing that I think is less obvious today, was that having people run around in a maze was seen as really degrading. It was an example to the depths to which TV had sunk at the time. With the indignities people willingly submit to on TV today, running around a maze like a lab rat might seem tame, but it was a much bigger deal then.

Like ABC couldn't find a better time slot for it than 4 p.m. It was getting killed by "Tattletales" over on CBS, and the show never really had a fighting chance.

(For you youngsters, in those pre-Oprah days the networks did actively program the 4:00 p.m. time slot. Local stations had the 90 minutes from 4:30-6:00 on the East Coast to play with, so you'd get things like WABC's classic "The 4:30 Movie" or WCBS running "The Mike Douglas Show", but by the mid-70's the 5 p.m. newscast was becoming a reality, spearheaded by WNBC's "NewsCenter 4" which I believe was the first in the market with a 5 p.m. show.)

Did any network daytime show ever have a permanent set? J! and WOF now do, but those are sort of quasi-nighttime shows. The cost of having a permanent set I think would have been more than building/breaking.


--Mike

And it was almost as rife with local pre-emptions as the noon slot was, especially by the early '80s. For example, I did not know of the existence of "Body Language" until it showed up on GSN -- it didn't run on either of the CBS affiliates that were in my hometown TV Guide.

And from what I read, the fact that many ABC affiliates dropped The Edge of Night at 4 p.m. led to its cancellation. I think in fall-1984 (still three months before its cancellation), Norfolk's ABC affiliate aired Joker and Tic Tac Dough.

That was around the time affiliates started airing alternate programming at 4 PM. Money Maze was carried on a tape-delay in my area at 9:30 the next morning. Although Tattletales was still cleared live, by '77 it was also on tape-delay, meaning that was another show I couldn't see because of school. Too bad the home VCR couldn't have become mainstream a few years earlier...

I also think that if a show tapes five weeks at a time, the network should be sure that it's going to be on the air that much longer unless it's willing to eat the costs and never air them. Since Money Maze's ratings never seemed that good so maybe that's something they wouldn't even have considered.

Come to think of it, "Money Maze" also had a 9:30 a.m. airing in Philadelphia. 'Zat where you were?

No. I watched them off of the Buffalo, NY stations...and on clear days Rochester (until Rochester was added to our cable in '78).

All true... we didn't get it in Atlanta either. (Surprise!) Not as important, perhaps, but this was also when ABC was scheduling its daytime shows differently on the west coast, where they had "Money Maze" on at 11 am followed by "Big Showdown" at 11:30. (The west coast TV Guide ad for "Three Whirlwind Windups for a Chance at $10,000" showed Maze, then Showdown, then Pyramid, which aired at 2 pm PT; the east coast one was Pyramid at 2, Big Showdown at 2:30, Money Maze at 4.) Anyway, this meant that in the west, "Money Maze" had to hold its own against "Jackpot" and the increasingly popular new soap "The Young and the Restless." Either way, doomed.

I'm guessing it happened the same over here in the NYC market...when I was younger I seem to remember watching Press Your Luck in the mid-afternoon during the brief time it was on in the 4 PM hour (which replaced Body Language, for those who didn't know (and there are some)).