Which weeks of shows never aired on USA Network? The only ones I know of are the following:

11/22/82 Vicki Lawrence & Richard Kline
10/10/84 Shelley Smith & Bill Cullen
11/21/83 Didi Conn & Richard Gilliland
12/23/85 Jean Bruce Scott & Jay Johnson

Oh, and Brendan, sorry to be off-topic but when you made a thread about celebrities who veoted their appearnces on GSN, you forgot to mention David Leisure (Super Password)

He probably signed his release form "Joe Isuzu" which kept them from airing them. :)

Minor correction to the above, first of all: For some reason, during the re-airings of the Melody Thomas/Tony Danza week, USA aired the Tuesday and Wednesday episodes of the Lawrence/Kline week (a three-day week due to Thanksgiving) instead of the Thomas/Danza episodes.

Other weeks that weren't seen on USA:

1/2/84 Rita Moreno & Richard Dean Anderson
8/19/85 Linda Kelsey & John Schuck
9/1/86 Rita Moreno & Earl Holliman
10/5/87 Abby Dalton & Leonard Maltin

The reason for the skipping of the first has, I believe, been talked about here before: In 1991, USA stopped rerunning partial weeks of the show. The last three were preempted because of tennis coverage.

And thanks for the heads-up about David Leisure, by the way. I did forget to put him on the list.


Brendan

He's lying.

;-)

Looks like USA did well with this, only a few episodes skipped. Too bad GSN only leases one season at a time.

Actually, unfortunately, a lot of episodes from November 1983 to September 1984 were skipped over because of USA golf and tennis coverage. A move from 4:30 to 3:30 later cut down greatly on those preemptions. But you're right in saying they did a good job rerunning it, seeing as they showed almost the entire series. At one time, "Pyramid" reruns were one of USA's highest-rated shows.


Brendan

I take it that when $25,000 Pyramid started on USA they aired the first episode from '82 and went practically right through? I guess they didn't jump around in the order like they did with most of their other shows - Press Your Luck, Sale of the Century, etc.

I think they started with fall 1984 episodes, went all the way to the end of the shows' run in 1991, then showed 1983-1984 episodes until 1993, where they showed 1982-1983 episodes, and by 1994, they were back to the 1984-1985 season when they pulled the series off the schedule.

My earliest memory of watching the USA reruns was 1988 or '89, and for some reason, I'm almost positive they did they same exact thing. I want to say they started off airing eps. from 1984-85 or so. Fast forward to around 1992, and I remember them showing eps. from the same seasons (I remember seeing a LOT of Ed Begley, Jr.). Later that year, they skipped to 1988 eps., and in early-1993, I remember seeing first season "blue box" episodes (WC trilons), and being excited about seeing a show on USA older than me*. But, even then, I don't think they started directly from week one; I remember one ep. w/Barry Gordon, and the peak of the show's pyramid logo couldn't even fit completely on DC's desk (this was one of the first weeks of being The NEW $25K Pyramid)...

My guess is when the show first started on USA, they had the 1983-85 episodes, then as the show proved to get good ratings for USA, they picked up other seasons, then eventually the $100K eps.

*When I watched them, I didn't realize Face the Music or Play the Percentages were two years before my birth.

USA seemed to lease shows on a year-to-year basis. When that year ran out, they'd renew the lease and pick up another part of the show's run. The shows that had long runs (Scrabble, PYL, Pyramid), constantly skipped around, especially Press, where USA would air episodes from '84, '85, and '86 all in the same calendar year.

Tyshaun

When The USA Network began beaming Scrabble in 1991, they began with the All-American Scrabble Tournament, when started in the fall of 1986 and ran until the day after Christmas. Sometime in 1993 (right around the time the show returned to NBC), they jumped back to 1984, right around when the pink and blue bonus squares began being worth Chuck bucks. In 1994, they flashed forward to 1988 and got as far as about mid-1989 when the program was yanked from the line-up during the late summer of 1995, at which point, I believe, USA televised two episodes per day.

I should add the following weeks that USA also skipped:

11/23/87 Alison LaPlaca & Tom Villard
12/28/87 Anne-Marie Johnson & Robert Hegyes

These weeks were both skipped due to the aforementioned "short week" policy. The first week had only three days due to Thanksgiving, and the second had only four days due to New Year's Eve.

By the way, USA started rerunning the game on 10/17/88, and the first episode they aired was the 10/8/84 show with Heidi Bohay & Michael Spound. They kept going in order -- most of the time -- and finished out with the final 1988 episode (Robin Riker & Charlie Siebert) in February 1992. The cycles then went like this:

February 1992 to December 1992: Martha Smith & Ken Kercheval (original air week 10/17/83) to Roxie Roker & Marla Gibbs (9/17/84)

January 1993 to December 1993: Lynn Redgrave & LeVar Burton (10/4/82) to Rita Moreno & Michael Spound (10/3/83)

January 1994 to fall of 1994: Mary Cadorette & Ed Begley Jr. (10/1/84) to Mary Cadorette & David Graf (8/12/85).

At that point, the series concluded its USA run after six years.


Brendan

And...I'll try one more time to get this right. Also never seen in the USA run were the first two weeks of "The $25,000 Pyramid," featuring Constance McCashin & Robert Mandan and Denise Miller & Jay Johnson.


Brendan

USA didn't seem to like airing premiere episodes, did they? They also never aired the first two weeks of Press Your Luck, and they started Caesar's Challenge with the debut of the second bonus game rather than the debut of the show. For Sale of the Century they only had a year or two of the series and it wasn't the first year.

I think they did air the premiere of $100,000 Pyramid. Were there any others?

In 1992, USA began playing episodes from 1988 of $otC and got as far as the third-to-last show before playing the 1985-86 nighttime edition all the way through. After that run had been exhausted, they restarted from 1988 until the program was withdrawn from the USA Network line-up during the summer of 1994.

They began Bullseye from the beginning and I'm pretty sure they started High Rollers from the top.

I remember reading a Cablevision mag from around December of '92, and it listed USA's 5 highest rated weekday shows for November 1992. Sadly, I recall what they were.

1. Murder, She Wrote 2.7
2. Quantum Leap 2.1
3. $25,000 Pyramid 1.7
4. Scrabble 1.6
5. Press Your Luck 1.5

As you can see, the game shows were well represented, and I remember seeing that they were still doing solidly when USA pulled the plug on them in 1995, because the man who took over for president Kay Koplovitz wanted to put an "edge" (read: younger demos) into USA. Free 4 All and Quicksilver's failures also hastened their demise.

Tyshaun

I think the debut of GSN hastened the demise of USA's block as well. Why have a part-time game show channel when there's another one doing it full time?