The night that I wrestled with the meshuggeneh desktop computer—the one that eventually had to be hauled into the repair shop so that the hard drive could be replaced—I was stuck for something to do while the diagnostic tests were running, so I grabbed the bedroom TV remote and started in with the channel surfing. Imagine my delight when I learned that DISH has added a new channel to its lineup: BUZZR (channel 245), the Fremantle Media-owned subchannel that offers up classic game shows to those couch potatoes jonesing for a fix of Match Game or Family Feud. Wikipedia says that DISH added BUZZR in May of this year but I’m still a little skeptical about that only because I go “round the horn” on a frequent basis if I can’t sleep at night, looking to see if I can find anything that won’t require a lengthy time investment. It seems to me I would have come across BUZZR sooner, but…what the hey.
I’m not a big game show fan as a rule. I watched a lot of them as a kid, and then
eventually grew to understand that most of them are vacuous, insipid, and a clear
threat to my logging as many classic movies under my belt before I’m summoned
to that Great Movie Palace in the Sky. Still,
I have a soft spot for the panel shows of the classic TV era like What’s
My Line?, I’ve Got a Secret, and To Tell the Truth…because there are
celebrities on these vintage telecasts that are idolized by your humble
narrator like Fred Allen (a panelist on Line from 1954 until his death in
1956) and Henry Morgan (Secret). The Game Show Network used to run these
repeats in the 1990s until Sony’s contract ran out…but by that time, GSN was
starting to shift toward their own homegrown programming anyway. (This resulted in people of my vintage
reclining in our porch rocking chairs and grumbling about how great things used
to be “back in the day.” “Remember when
AMC and TVLand used to be good? Those were the days…”)
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