Changing the game

Just watched the debut of Buzzr's two-hour documentary Game Changers. For what it was, the show was okay. But it wasn't anything more.

Julius Caesar once said that all Gaul was divided into three parts, and if he were still around today, he could say the same about Game Changers. The first hour was more or less a history of the genre from its start in radio to 1980 or thereabouts.

This hour was occasionally hard to distinguish from a long promo for Buzzr's usual lineup. In fact, when the diginet ran promos after each segment, they seemed to blend right into the documentary. We saw some of the classic clips, like the bit of anality on Newlywed Game and Billy Crystal's quick trip up the pyramid in the winner's circle.

Amid the clips Alex Trebek interviewed a lot of the folks who were there. It was familiar history to game show buffs like moi, though I did learn that Peter Marshall took the Hollywood Squares gig mostly to spite his personal foe Dan Rowan. (The story has appeared before. I just wasn't aware of it or had forgotten about it.)

The second part of the doc was a half-hour paean of praise to Jeopardy and Wheel of Fortune. I don't know if Sony paid for the promotion, but they might as well have. The only interesting bit was Chuck Woolery's recounting of his famous salary dispute with Merv Griffin on Wheel. The story is painfully well known, but it was fun to hear the details from Woolery himself.

The third part was a half-hour on game shows from the late nineties to the present, almost exclusively about Millionaire, Deal or No Deal, and Drew Carey's The Price is Right. The documentary skipped over an awful lot from the last thirty-five years, including (not surprisingly) the launch of GSN in 1994. Well, you can't expect a plug for a direct competitor. Though to give Buzzr credit, they did offer brief comments from Todd Newton and Mark Walberg, who were identified on-screen as the hosts of Whammy and Russian Roulette.

Since Buzzr didn't even want to breathe GSN's name, there was nary a glimpse of fine originals like Lingo and The Chase. Not to mention superb shows on other cable networks like Remote Control, Win Ben Stein's Money, Legends of the Hidden Temple and Cash Cab. I know you can't squeeze everything into a couple hours. But the "modern" half of the show should have been more than a half-hour plug for Jeopardy and Wheel of Fortune, another half-hour of Regis and Howie and Drew, and a fleeting glimpse of ABC's recent prime time revivals at the end.

Maybe the most moving moment in the entire documentary was the concluding "in memory" notices for people who gave interviews on the show but died before the debut. (This production had a longer gestation period than most elephants.) Monty Hall, Alan Thicke and the game show encyclopedia's Fred Westbrook were among those remembered. R.I.P.

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