The fateful year

You know how I love the oldies boards. With a lack of big game show news today - I had to get a faux tweet out a gaming lawsuit against GSN - I peeked around at the boards for bits and pieces.

For most people the year 1990 holds no enormous significance, unless you happen to be turning 28 this year. But for game show oldies fans, it is the Great Dividing Line. Before 1990 we frolicked in the golden age of the genre. After 1990 it's been downhill and down-hillier, as the genre decays into...well, whatever it is today.

I think this view is loony, but it has real currency on the oldies boards. Check Game Show Forum's top 50 list if you don't believe me. Forty-three of their top fifty shows originated before the deadly deadline of 1990. It's been mostly miserable since the fateful year for older-is-better folks.

Posters on Game Show Paradise have recently written a couple of long and sad accounts of how everything fell apart at the dividing line. They mourn for pre-1990 daytime game shows on the broadcast networks as the golden relics of a bygone era.

Of course, it's easy (and correct) to ridicule this view as good ol' days fantasy. The media universe has simply evolved into a zillion channel smorgasbord instead of the old suffocating broadcast triopoly. Many new and often very good game shows have appeared on cable and the Internet and even what's left of the broadcast dinosaurs.

But the oldies boards still shed tears for the ancient triopoly. Funny thing, they use the Internet to do it!

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