From Yahoo!:
http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20080130/tv_nm/...51pj4pwCn65GL8C

If this doesn't work, will it all be a dream?

I guess we've exhausted the comics. Now we're on to cherry-picking 80s Primetime Soap actors.

/Come on down, Ted Shackleford!

Only if Shandi's in the shower...


\nice set-up line BTW

\\at least we won't have to hear the ref guy from NBN

\\\This sounds more like Trump Card 2.0 actually, since there is a Q&A element...

At least it can't be as dull as Camouflage or How Much is Enough...

Anybody seen Robert Hegyes lately?

Scuzzlebutt's leg is hosting a game show. I think I've seen it all.

All that's missing is Larry Hagman as announcer...introduce another home shopping element with a "Who Shot J.R." contest. It practically writes itself! :-P

/Someone get Lorenzo Lamas on the phone!
//Oh wait...

Wasn't Lucy Ewing considered for Family Feud?

Match Game in 1996. Dolly Parton was considered for the Feud.

Actually, I think that'd be pretty cool.

Linda Gray could be the Bingo Ball Babe.

Come to think of it, how long do you suppose it'll be until there's a SPECIAL! celebrity week?
It could pit the Ewing family against the Barnes family in a battle of bingo wits.

Didn't Charlene Tilton have the bigger, uh, assets?

Bingo America premiered on Monday March 31. I thought it was a decent show, better than ABCs Bingo Night. Patrick Duffy is a better host than the English chap on the ABC show, there's a Q&A portion, so it's not just calling letters and numbers. There's an audience and the set is not dark and moody, like most post 2000 game shows. I think this show might have possibilities.

If I've told the suits at GSN once, I've told them a thousand times: when you buy a set piece from ABC's Bingo Night, you don't put it in the dryer after you wash it. It shrinks!

Seriously, BA is harmless, has playalong, and has more to it than watching numbers pulled out of a giant hopper. Really, nothing much to complain about. Nothing I'll watch with any regularity, either.

I have to admit that I did play along with it on its first night. Didn't win anything, but I thought it was a fun game. I think a lot of what makes the show enjoyable is the intense playalong factor (up to 83 chances to win on any given episode) and probably would be pretty bland without it. Given the amount of response the website got, I think this has potential to be GSN's biggest original yet.


Greg

I played along on the first night and won $50! :D

Last night I didn't win anything. Oh well.

And that reminds me, it's a good time to print out some cards.

Which means your current rate of pay for watching the show is $50/hour. Doesn't suck, for sure. :)

Well, when you put it that way, yeah, that's not bad.

/It's seven times better than my normal job.

OK, I've seen it all now. There may actually be at least one junk prize on the Bingo Bonus Board- hot dogs, from last night's episode.

I agree that there ought to be some less-valuable prizes, though I'm not sure I'd go as far as "hot dogs." (Well, maybe if they were really good hot dogs. Was sauerkraut included?)

Anyway, if that's the case, seems to me there ought to be some sort of buy-out; e.g., "We'll give you $100 for every number you've called so far, or you can pick another number..."

Yeah. I'm spending other people's money. I had fun doing it, too.

Pink's, by all reports, *are* really good hot dogs. That said, yeah, seeing a zonk prize on the bonus board did not impress me.

(And, really. Turning over a Mystery Prize and then having Patrick tell them immediately what it was? That wasn't a Mystery Prize, that was a We Can't Find An Appropriate Icon Prize.)

Honestly, I wasn't impressed by much of it. The game was flat, the chrome was largely stripped off (and this show NEEDS chrome), and Duffy as a host was "meh" at best. I watched my one episode (and I even fast-forwarded through most of Games 2 and 3) and I don't feel a pressing need to watch any more.

Speaking of which: if ever there was a show where editing would come into play, it's this one. Unless the third game is some sort of sudden-death "first one to answer wins" deal, there's gonna be a heckuvalot more ball-rolling-down-the-chute shots in a two-game show than when the match goes to three games.

Every show *is* self-contained, right? There's no straddling?

/not even of Ms. Wallasch

Pretty sure the third game was a no-balls-required race to three correct answers.

You are correct, sir.

*giggity!*

[Lemon beat me to the best-of-5 part] and each answer starts with the subsequent letter in BINGO.

Yeah, no love for the art department. How hard is it to make clip art, really?

/Pink's dogs vs. White Castle burgers..who would win?

Pink's hot dogs? Now, that is a zonk.

Spoken by someone who has never had one. MMMMM. I would, given the choice however , take a cash prize instead.

And that makes two game shows with Pinks as a booby-prize. The other, class?

For all we know, Alecia makes a damned good hot dog.

I think you missed the link.

That said, I am a Grey's Papaya guy my ownself.

Whoops! :) Joke recieved. Whoosh averted.

My comments on Pinks' Hot Dogs though, still stand.

I tried Pink's for the first time last November. I was warned that there is usually up to an hour wait to place your order. I said there was no way I'd wait that long for a hot dog and I didn't. I believe I was there on a Thursday afternoon and there was barely anyone there. That's when I tried it. I had a Rosie O'Donnell Long Island Dog and a regular hot dog. The regular hot dog was better and I wouldn't go back.

Wow. And you'd think Rosie would know her way around a hot dog.

/chili and sauerkraut? Ugh.

Oh Chris....Tempting as it is...I won't touch the Rosie line. Guess I'm "flounder"ing.

*buzz!*

What is "Personals"?

RIGOLETTO!

If the main game prize wasn't $500 plus all the numbers pulled, I'm right there with you. The absolute maximum prize would be $3,349; so I don't mind "You won the game, let's find out what your prize is."

That said, the main game was as banal as just about anything I've seen. Mercifully, I didn't see an occasion where a letter was pulled and both players already had that letter, but it's just as possible that those pulls were edited. Worse yet was the five-question tiebreaker nipped lock-stock-barrel from You Don't Know Jack. At least they went with the Blockbusters question set-up, so they score a point for that.

But hey, I'd sit through just about anything if $50 was there for me at the end of the half-hour. If there was no play-at-home element, there'd be absolutely no reason for the show to exist.

This occurred to me as I was watching. I am quite certain they throw out any pull that meets that criteria. (Saves them a few bucks, too...they don't have to pay the pot on a given letter pull when both players have it. I bet they sigh contentedly when the G and the O go.) Especially since it matters not one bit for the purpose of the home bingo game itself....so long as they have one each of B-I-N-G-O (and by the definition of the victory conditions, they have to), they're golden.

And honestly, knowing how the back-end of the play-at-home element works, I have zero interest in that, too. When you're playing bingo "for reals", there is at least a little anticipation as to whether you're going to get the number you need since it's a true random draw and you have your card printed and in front of you before a ball is ever pulled. (Same with the lottery, really, even though I maintain that it's a tax on the stupid.) Here, when you know that they already know what the numbers are for a given game, and basically their computer is simply printing out "YOU WIN" or "YOU LOSE" and just encoding the news in an effort to try to create fake suspense, it's not interesting. Same reason I had zero interest in "playing along" on NBN.

Watched and played along twice now.

It's MUCH better than NBN, in that there seems (to me) , more vested interest in playing along. IIRC, if you won on NBN, your name went into a hopper for a major prize, right? Here, i'll take the $50.

That said, it's the ONLY reason to watch. The show is slow, Duffy is dry, and the overall quality of the production seems amateurish. There were times the audio levels of the music drowned out what Duffy was saying to the audience. C'mon....this isn't public access!

It seems that every time I pull for a GSN original to do well, I'm dissapointed. They just haven't hit one out of the park since Russian Roulette.

Anyone know why Russian Roulette was cancelled so quickly? I believe it only had two seasons. Weren't its ratings that great, or was it more of a budget decision that they just couldn't afford to make new episodes?

I thought it was one of the best originals...if Lingo (another good original, IMHO) can survive for six seasons, you'd figure RR would have more than two.

The budget? Then again, all the originals of that order went out the door around the same time, so it's likely the network as a whole couldn't handle things...or something.

-Jason

They lost me as soon as one of the 'speed up' questions in Game 3 started with "What 'G' state..." and didn't end right there.

Oh, and the question that one woman answered for absolutely nothing but $1 added to the bank. (She already had the B, and her opponent had already answered incorrectly.)

I guess it would help if I actually printed a card. But I decided it was too much work to get off the laptop and go to all the trouble of using the desktop, logging into gsn, etc, just for a card that already knows that I'm a loser (as Lemon already explained).

I watched my first episode today, and was not dissapointed or impressed. It is an okay show, but it sure has its bad spots. One thing that annoyed the heck out of me was when they cut to the audience. I thought I was watching an episode of America's Funniest Home Videos. It just seemed really awkward.

Duffy is not a bad host, but he could use some improvement. It sometimes seems like he is talking in Slow motion.

Overall, I am not going to make this appointment television for me. This show is the "turn to when there is absolutely Nothing on".

I thought Scuzzlebutt's Leg was reasonable as a host, but I just can't get over it being Patrick Duffy up there. Maybe it's an 80's thing; I had the same problem with Corbin Bernsen.

(Mind you, it threw me to see Arnie Becker playing third base for the Cleveland Indians, too.)

I'm not sure I wouldn't pick Food Network over that. Even if it WAS Sandra Lee.

/opening a can is not cooking

"Today we're going to make soup. I start with a can of Campbell's Soup".

I really wish they'd offer a little more truth in advertising, and rename her show "The Half-Assed Gourmet."

/has she used Lunchables in a show yet?
//I've got pitchforks and torches at the ready

Someone needs to tell her that her putting corn nuts, popcorn, apple pie filling and pumpkin seeds over an angel food cake and calling it a kwanzaa cake is just wrong.

//remember that game show, pressure cooker?

Is it Cocktail Time yet?

Mr. Armadillo wrote:

is where you'd find the Mexican resort of Acapulco?

Bingo America meets Quicksilver. ;-)