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Monday, April 17
PETER MARSHALL
TO RECEIVE 2006 GSC
BILL CULLEN AWARD
To prepare for The Hollywood Squares in 1966, Peter Marshall says he watched everything Bill Cullen did for three months. "It was a textbook," said Marshall in a 2002 interview with TVgameshows.net.
Marshall studied well. The five-time Emmy winner is the Game Show Congress 2006 Bill Cullen Career Achievement Award Winner.
Still broadcasting three hours a day on radio's Music of Your Life, Marshall will receive the honor at the GSC5 Legends Luncheon July 16 in Burbank, Cal.
"I'm truly honored and greatly looking forward to it," said Marshall when told of the selection last week.
Marshall has made repeated references in interviews to Cullen as setting the standard of performance for game show emcees.
In the TVgameshows.net interview, Marshall said: "He had several shows which he kept on the air at least six months or a year longer than they probably should have just because he was Bill Cullen."
Brothers Jack Narz and Tom Kennedy were joint recipients of last year's Cullen Award. The statuette was established in 2004.
In addition to the Legends Luncheon, a highlight event of the weekend will be the July 15 Tic Tac Dough Reunion with host Wink Martindale, legendary contestant Thom McKee and his wife Jenny and series producer Ron Greenberg. Stu Shostak will moderate a panel retracing the history of the series, followed by Martindale hosting a game of Tic Tac Dough with McKee, a 43-game winner on the series, playing.
KING WORLD PITCHES
HOUR GAME SHOW BLOCK,
FRIEDMAN TO DEVELOP
Ending an extended drought in the syndication market, King World and Sony Pictures Television will pitch a one-hour game show block to local stations for the fall of 2007.
The move was announced in a variety of industry trade publications Monday morning.
Jeopardy! and Wheel of Fortune executive producer Harry Friedman will develop the shows. Last October in Raleigh, Friedman said the market looked "guardedly optimistic" for an opening for new game shows in the 2007-08 season.
TVgameshows.net left an e-mail message for Friedman Monday morning. At least three national publications speculated one show will be an original and the other will be a remake. Unclear is whether stations will be required to take both shows as a block or an option would be available to split the hour for sales to opposing stations.
King World Chairman Roger King was quoted in Broadcasting and Cable as saying he "is looking for an enthusiastic response from the marketplace."
The distributor, now a subsidiary of CBS, has enjoyed only one extended success in game show syndication since introducing Wheel and Jeopardy! in 1983 and 1984. Hollywood Squares ran from 1998-2004.
Several attempts by both King World and SPT in the last two decades ran aground. In 1985, King World's news quiz Headline Chasers, created by Wink Martindale, only lasted a season. The company's pilot for Monopoly with Peter Tomarken in the late 1980s did not sell. King World sold a one-hour summer block of Super Jeopardy! and Monopoly with Mike Reilly to ABC in 1990.
Sony's efforts to revive The Dating Game and The Newlywed Game in 1996 in totally revamped formats failed. Original Newlywed host Bob Eubanks and former Love Connection emcee Chuck Woolery were drafted to preside over the shows from 1997-99 (an additional year of reruns aired in some markets).
No new game show has been introduced at NATPE for four years, the longest drought since the genre first went into syndication in the mid-1960s. NBC Enterprises is said to be shopping a syndicated daytime version of Deal or No Deal to stations for a fall 2007 start.
 DEAL RECEIVING SUMMER
REST FROM NBC,
RETURNS MONDAYS IN FALL
NBC is attempting to avoid some of the mistakes of ABC in overexposing Who Wants to Be a Millionaire in its first two years.
Peacock Network executives announced Monday they will rest Deal or No Deal for the summer, unlike ABC's practice of continuing with first-run Millionaire episodes year-round.
In a Broadcasting and Cable story Monday, NBC announced the Deal season finale will air June 5 with a $1 million-plus final prize potential before a two-hour finale of The Apprentice.
The Howie Mandel-hosted series will return Mondays at 8 (EDT) in September and will stay as a weekly series except for special added epsiodes where needed.
NBC is scaling back to show to a single episode this week while it airs its Celebrity Cooking Showdown five-night special. Deal has dominated its time slot Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays even against major competition and recently topped the first hour of the NCAA basketball championship game by three full rating points.
However, Endemol executive David Goldberg has insisted on the network slowing its greed in order to avoid burning out the franchise.
Even former Millionaire host Regis Philbin told B&C: “It's a big hit right now, but it's making me nervous. It's getting a big number for (NBC) and they could use the numbers. But I hope they don't run it into the ground.”
While Millionaire was used in its first season as a neutron bomb to obliterate opposing shows with extra episodes, including opposing networks' attempts to clone the quiz, ABC began to back off after the summer of 2000 when the second episode of Survivor eased past WWTBAM by a single point.
Endemol USA President David Goldberg says he and executive producer Scott St. John want to avoid using celebrities or extensive theme shows, two other contributing factors to the ultimate downfall of Millionaire in prime time.
Some online reports are suggesting ABC is about to relinquish rights to Super Millionaire as a network franchise (which was last used in May 2004) but that speculation has been denied. ABC has a contract window by which it has to use a form of Millionaire at least once as a stunt series. That was shelved this season when Dancing with the Stars became a major hit.
Endemol is hopeful for a syndicated start in either fall 2007 or 2008. King World announced Monday plans, in partnership with Sony Pictures Television, to launch a new hour-long game show block in 2007. Deal is also expected to end up in a Spanish-language version on NBC Universal's Telemundo.
Meredith Vieira to Stay with Millionaire
Lingo Begins Nationwide Contestant Search
John O'Hurley to Replace Richard Karn on Family Feud
Peter Tomarken, Wife Killed in Plane Crash
Meredith, Trebek Nominated for Daytime
Emmys
Philippines Hit with
Biggest Game Show Tragedy in History
Michael Davies Signs with Sony
Welcome Cover Story All in the Game Players of the Week Classic Moment Bonus Round
The Winners
FAQ
Part 2 Transition Games Across the Ocean
Ralph Edwards Tribute
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