Who watches which other game shows?

If you read this blog much, you know this retired actuary can't resist numbers. That's how I made my living for 35 years.

So I got a faux tweet out of this story about crossover viewership between several current network game shows. And now I'm getting a full-blown entry out of the data. (For all the gory details, click on the graph.)

The biggest crossover is very predictable. Seventy percent of 100K Pyramid viewers also watch Celebrity Family Feud. The shows have run back-to-back on ABC for a lot of summers now, and it's hardly surprising that many people watch both. Not to mention that they're both classic formats which rank in just about every top ten game show list ever made.

Hollywood Game Night has low-to-middling crossover viewership with most of the other five shows in the study. My guess is that it crosses over pretty well with The Wall, its NBC partner in game show crime on Thursday nights. But for some reason The Wall isn't included in the data. It's in reruns, and maybe they only had numbers for first-run shows.

As the article points out, shows on the same network tend to cross over well. Fox's Spin the Wheel draws a fair number of crossover viewers with its network mate Beat Shazam, though they run on different nights. It's outside the study's view, but the Fox shows also get similar ratings and demos. ABC's Press Your Luck draws a lot of crossovers with network buddies Celebrity Family Feud and 100K Pyramid, even if it doesn't share the same night with them.

ABC seems to have created a critical mass of game shows that are all benefiting from mutual crossover viewership. All six of the reboots on the alphabet net (warning, Variety speak) are averaging at least three million viewers, with Feud and Pyramid getting four or five million. Those numbers are just fine for broadcast summer fare nowadays.

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