As most game show (and TV Trivia) lovers know, the longest running game show in American television is "The Price Is Right". Who's #2 on the list. I think it's either "Concentration" or "Wheel of Fortune" but I'm not too sure. Anyone here know?

Even by the most generous accounting, Concentration was only continuously on the air for 20 years. Wheel has 25 continuous years in syndication, and 33 combined with daytime.

Doesn't J! have that beat? Just short of 11 years in its original format (March 1964 to January 1975), the five month revival (October 1978 to March 1979), and 24 continuous years in syndication.

That's why I said "continuously". Going further, though, Wheel would (I believe) win back the 2nd place title if you count total number of seasons, counting daytime and syndicated separately.

That wasn't a continuous run though. At least one version of Wheel has aired every single weekday (save for pre-emptions) since 1975.

Greg

At no point did the OP say the run had to be continuous.

And while I understand Robert's logic, you can't really say WoF's been on for 41 years if you combine the daytime run and nighttime run. Then for TPiR you'd have to count James, Kennedy and Davidson's runs in with Barker, Carey and Cullen (plus the brief CBS Barker prime-time run). By that count, TPiR's been on for 75 years.

/Not really.

It just felt like it during those last 5 or so Barker years.

With Wof and TPIR there are many rerun weeks, so I assume you're counting those. Most network games didn't have "seasons." It was 52 weeks of original production.

More and more often, the terminology is getting blurred anyway. I just heard that Survivor is about to start its seventeenth season. Funny, I don't remember it debuting in 1991.

Ultimately, the most impressive count, and the best one to use as a comparison, is the total number of episodes produced. Used to be that was pretty obscure information, but any more with all the resources at our disposal, we can make some pretty darned good estimates, if not know outright.

Well, if you want numbers...Price hits 6,800 at the end of this coming week.

/That number used to be so obscure, the staff didn't know it.
//I'm not trying to be funny -- they really didn't.

And as everyone knows, the Jeopardy! staff lost count of the number of episodes in Ken Jennings's run.

/it has to be true
//my bowling buddy told me

I abandoned it after a few minutes when I was writing my last response, but some thumbnail math gave me 9000-something total episodes ever of Wheel of Fortune, against 8000-something total episodes ever of Jeopardy!

. . . but J! is gaining on Wheel by 35 episodes a year (6 vs. 13 weeks of reruns).

(Wheel still has 13 weeks of reruns, right?)

Yeah...Survivor considers every thirteen-episode 'game' to be a season. They just happen to run two of those a year. (Yes, I'm sure you know that.)

/While I'm here...Matt Ottinger is the game show host I would most emulate.
//And the super-human crime fighter.

Pretty good thumbnailing when it comes to Jeopardy. As I said, we have resources, and in this particular case we have:

Don Pardo telling us on the last episode that there were 2,753 shows produced, which probably did not count the one season of weekly syndication, so let's add 26 more.

Twenty-two weeks of the 1978-79 version, which were unlikely to have had any repeats. Even though one or more may have been preempted, let's call it 110.

Friday's episode of Jeopardy was #5380. Since the 65 season one repeats were given different episode numbers, the actual number of new episodes produced is 5315. (Technically, one of those episodes was a retrospective and not a game.)

Add 'em up and Monday's episode will be the 8,205th episode of Jeopardy ever produced, give or take a very, very few. If you count Bill's nine years of day & night episodes, Price probably still has more, but with fewer repeats, Jeopardy is gaining on it each season as well.

May we add the 13 or so ABC "Super Jeopardy" episodes to the total?

And, for that matter, Jep!. (Yes, I realize it was a poor version of the franchise, but still...)

Before I'd add Jep!, I'd add Rock and Roll Jeopardy!

Time to find out what we messed up:

The upcoming Fans vs. Faves is the 16th season, not 17th.

/America's Next Top Model calls them "cycles"
//only current prime time shows with more seasons than Survivor: the original Law & Order, Cops, America's Most Wanted, 60 Minutes, America's Funniest Home Videos, and The Simpsons
///Cops was borne of the 1988 writers' strike

If I may double-nitpick :D .. Does 60 Minutes technically count as primetime even though it starts an hour before the standard 8/7c - 11/10c?

Primetime starts at 7pm. That's why WOF and J! are in what is called "primetime access."

I think "Survivor" should only be credited with the TV seasons it ran, not the short flights within the seasons.

The East and West Coasts disagree with you. "Prime access" <> "prime time."

Anyhow, per the Wiki article (apply usual caveats, especially since there are no sources cited), it says that Sunday night prime time does in fact begin at 7, so 60 Minutes would count.

First, you forgot 20/20, 48 Hours, Dateline, and maybe Prime Time(on hiatus but supposed to return), depends on if you count the years it was called 20/20.

Second if you are going to compare longetivity of shows you have to count year or TV Seaons either wheather a show aired somtime between Sept to Sept or May to May like the Emmys,

I just don't buy Survivor has had more "seasons" than than King of the Hill or ER!

I'd say for purposes of counting, 2 seasons equals one year for Survivor. Then again, that's still 8 years. And each year is well over the standard 22 eps.

We don't have to trust Wiki on this one. Anyone who's taken TV 101 knows that network prime time television is 8-11 (ET) Monday through Saturday and 7-11 (ET) on Sunday. One only has to look at the programming to see that. (FOX only programs through 10pm and the smaller netlets may do even less, I'm not sure.)

For the record, in its first few seasons 60 Minutes aired as early as 6pm and alternated with another news program week to week.

I had considered and decided not to include Rock & Roll Jeopardy, but had completely forgotten Super Jeopardy and Jep. Of course even adding all three doesn't dramatically change our total (maybe a hundred more?)


In a Golden Road thread, I came up with about 2500 Cullen episodes day and night. So if we're combining all versions and looking at sheer tonnage we've got about 9300 Price to 8300 Jeopardy. So even though Jeopardy is making a few more weeks of shows than Price each season, it would still be a few decades before they caught up.

And in the mid-70s, before the changes were made to prime access that started prime time at 7 p.m. on Sundays, "60 Minutes" aired at 6 p.m. on Sundays, leading most people to think that the show was on its way to death, like so many similarly-scheduled news programs. Little did they know...

I agree with you, but at the same time I wanted to do a little better than "Well, any idiot knows that. Why? Just 'cuz."

And yeah, CW (I almost called it WB) and MyNetwork both close up shop at 10:00P too.

On top of that, I was only counting the daytime show...there's also the (at least) 300 episodes of the '70s nighttime show, the 170 Kennedy episodes, the 80 Davidson episodes, the 31 primetime specials, and the three intentionally unaired shows, taking it to 9,884, give or keep a few hundred.

...so yeah, Jeopardy!'s still got a ways to go to beat it.

Steve Gavazzi wrote:

I'm curious about this. Why were they intentionally unaired?

Yowza, I didn't realize that. How about that, they're probably getting reasonably close to producing the 10,000th episode of The Price Is Right in television history, and the only ones who know (or care) are us!

He's probably talking about the new host auditions.

Mark Steines, George Hamilton, and Todd Newton, IIRC.

From the G-R timeline, I would assume he's talking about the "real" third episode that had to be dumped because one contestant was ineligible, a nighttime show that was rendered useless because of a production problem in the showcases, and another show that got its episode number marked with an X because contestant's row got shuffled without anybody noticing.

-Jason

Jason's exactly right.

Incidentally, the nighttime show (which, coincidentally, was that run's original third episode) is what prompted the creation of the double overbid rule. Prior to that episode, if both contestants overbid, they'd have both of them rebid until at least one of them was under. This was the first time it occurred on either run, and Roger somehow got the calculators that they used to figure out the differences screwed up so badly that nobody could figure out how to fix them.

Was there some reason (either technical or S&P) that they couldn't just use a pencil and paper to calculate the differences?

Hell if I know. I don't completely understand the story, either, but the records I've seen from that era seem to indicate that it, or at least some version of it that makes more sense, is true.

That day will go down in history as the day the Dob was stopped.

If I may jump back a little bit, to the debate about the "season" terminology -- it *used* to be that a season and a production cycle were invariably one in the same, but that just hasn't been the case in the past few years. So why not use something like the British terminology, where that's *never* been the case? There, a production cycle is a series. Survivor is going on its 17th series. Countdown is in its 56th series.

You could also make the case that each individual "series" is a spin-off of the original "Survivor." So "Survivor: Marquesas" ran one season, "Survivor: Palau" ran one season, etc. With the exception of Jeff, the cast changes every "series," so each series ran a total of one season.