Poor Richard's almanack

Rambling around the game show Interwebs on the day after New Year's, I came across this interesting thread at Game Show Forum...

Steve Harvey Best Answer Challenge. It's the number one game show in syndication the most weeks each year for at least 5 years running. He's [Steve Harvey] not far away from being the longest tenured American Feud host, and he's not going away anytime soon. He is a comedian hosting a game show propelled by unintentionally honest, hilarious answers, just like everyone that came before him, and no matter what the material actually is.

As you might expect on the oldies board to end all oldies boards, this attempt to treat Steve Harvey (at all) sympathetically runs headlong into a buzzsaw of criticism. As always, the unspoken motivation behind the criticism is that Steve Harvey is not the gentleman in the screenshot. Even worse, Harvey is going to break that gentleman's longevity record on Feud pretty soon.

Which got me thinking about my own opinion of Richard Dawson. My possibly heretical view is that he did his best work - and that includes everything - as a panelist in his first few years on Match Game. He soured on the show in his later seasons, of course, and then he became insufferable. But for those first few seasons, he was just great. I mean really, really great.

And you know why he was so good on Match Game? He wasn't the host. He wasn't always on camera so he didn't grate on the audience, as the massive-ego Richard could so often do on Feud. Instead, he could pick his spots on Match Game and supply a quip or three for quick laughs.

That's also why Dawson's Match Game eps dominate Buzzr's schedule and still occupy a lot of space at GSN. Meanwhile, his Feud eps have long vanished from GSN and are dwindling away at Buzzr. There's just no getting away from Richard on Feud, and that wears out a lot of viewers (even oldies fans at the oldies diginet).

In the linked Game Show Forum thread, a typically sour poster grumps that Steve Harvey hogs too much attention on Feud. If that's true of Harvey, then it was ginormously, thumpingly, bodaciously true of Dawson in his days on the show. The good thing about Richard on Match Game was that he couldn't dominate the show. Which helped a lot.

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