On Fri, Jul 8, 2011 at 9:13 AM, Joe Hass <[email protected]> wrote:
> (SNIP) I firmly believe that the Winner's Circle is the greatest part of > any > game show in the genre's history. There's tension, the teamwork, the > sense that you're playing along, and that relentless series of 60 > chirps that only seem to get louder and louder as the time shrinks. > > When the Osmond-era Pyramids came along, I never liked them. The game > format was virtually identical (6 in 20 instead of 7 in 30 in the > front end). But I immediately knew why it didn't work for me. > > There was no Winner's Circle postmortem > > This happened when someone didn't win. The buzzer would sound, there'd > be that brief "awwww" from the audience followed by the clap. > Depending on how much time they had, Clark would come in and dissect > what went wrong. There'd be thinking of clues, yelling from offstage > or the other players. If someone had given an illegal clue, he'd > usually explain what happened and why (this, of course, led to Vicki > Lawrence once calling a judge an asshole). In any case, it was the > cherry on the top for me. > > Yesterday, over at Grantland.com, Bill Simmons did a brief write up on > his remembrances of the program: in particular, the postmortem. He > linked to a 1979 episode of the $20K edition featuring David > Letterman. Suffice to say, Mr Simmons comments would align more with > Mr Marousek's attitude toward Mr Clark than mine. > > http://goo.gl/I9gp9 > I agree 100% with Joe here, and not at all with Simmons (though, while I do think the Winner's Circle is the best end game, with the Lightning Round a close second, I have never been a big fan of TPIR). It would be really interesting to have someone play this clip on Dave's show and have him talk a little bit about it - I don't see Clark as being a Dick here at all. The effect of this post-mortem is to make both players, both giver and receiver, celebrity and ordinary contestant, just another 2 game players. This is the kind of thing you would at home after playing any game like this - sit around a bit and talk about why it was so hard, or what else you could have done. And I am no defender of Clark - unlike Simmons, I detested the Bloopers show, never liked Bandstand (though I was just a wee tot then) and hated just about anything else Dick Clark ever did. -- TV or Not TV .... The Smartest (TV) People! You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "TV or Not TV" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/tvornottv?hl=en
