I was listening to this Tuesday’s The Rest Is Entertainment this morning on the way to work – I’m a couple of days behind, but I was aware there was some discussion on the future of quiz shows. TV’s Richard Osman (one-time creative head of Endemol UK, knows what he’s talking about) was very positive about the future and its streaming potential. I (amateur industry critic, was on Weakest Link once), have consistently thought the future of quiz shows is pretty bleak and nothing has really changed my opinion. And here are some reasons why.

• Discoverability and inertia. If you’re a quiz in daytime getting your consistently strong ratings, you have it relatively easy. Daytime is about routine, you switch on your channel at the same time and the same show comes on. Occasionally channels will try something else in the shot which is incredibly annoying, numbers go down, if the show is good sometimes they go back up again but you don’t actually have to do much as a viewer to discover these new shows, it’s more passive. If you want to find a new show on a streaming service, you’ve got to actively go and look for it. When people are paying a tenner a month or whatever for a service, they’re not going to go out of their way to watch a quotidian quiz show, which they will have no idea even exists unless Netflix starts blanket advertising its existence, they’ll usually want a drama or something big scale, something that feels worth your time and investment. Is anyone in their day to day life going out of their way to watch and talk about Are You Smarter Than A Celebrity? No they are not. Even something pretty good like Netflix’s Cheat comes along, which you could have put on terrestrial and probably would have done OK but unspectacularly, it barely moves the dial – in fact it was pretty much the worst original performer on the service for several weeks. Older people might be timeshifting Only Connect (370k in catch-up in the latest Thinkbox), but they’re not timeshifting Alan Carr’s Picture Slam (82k), or The Hit List (52k) or The Chase (33k, 34k, 69k, 43k, 63k).
• Localisation. To be clear here, we’re talking about quiz shows, there will always be space for competition and unscripted on TV, mainly because there is something pretty universal about falling in love, voting people off, and trying to tell if a handbag is a handbag or if the handbag is actually cake. Quiz, however, is not quite universal. Sure, the idea of getting the question right and winning a prize is, but a quiz where the material appeals to everybody in the world is a quiz where the material appeals to nobody in the world. Early questions on Millionaire, The Chase et al tend to be about local cultures, phrases, sayings, TV shows because that’s where the audience is, I would expect anyone from the UK to struggle with the first five questions of Romanian WWTBAM even if they were translated into English, for example. In streaming terms this isn’t great, either your show is full of international slop (“what’s the capital of France?”) or you limit your audience who probably won’t be bothered enough to find it anyway, and then it doesn’t do well enough to spin-off into other local versions.
• Business. At least with Netflix and Amazon you still get paid to make the thing. If as suggested, you try and make a show for Youtube or TikTok presumably you’d need to front up the money for the entire series first then hope that a) people find it and b) there’s enough of a long tail that you’d make your money back in the long term. I’m just looking at some of the viewing figures for older shows currently on ITV Studios’ Puzzle channel – An episode of Pick Me with 2.8k views. Eggheads averaging about a thousand. Ooh, an episode of Sitting on a Fortune is up to almost six thousand after two months. How long is it going to take you to make a return on those sorts of figures? Sure, clips from shows do well, but they’re minutes long and you know exactly what reaction is expected of you going into them. And sure, “guess the X from the emoji” quiz videos are viral and popular, but they’re not television are they?
• Interactivity. Everyone thinks they want this, by episode two you’re happy enough to just shout at the television. It is already a lot of effort scrolling through the list of shows to get to the one you want. If I want to interact with the TV, I’ll turn my PlayStation on.

So having said all that let’s end on a potential counter example. Pop Culture Jeopardy starts next Wednesday on Amazon Prime. Everyone knows what Jeopardy is. They haven’t extended it to an hour (as far as I know). It’s not the first online spin-off they’ve done, they did Sports Jeopardy on Crackle which they did three runs of, this is at least about something that possibly has broader appeal. I understand it will be watchable in the UK. If that can’t do anything, what chance do you think your Quizzy Settlers of Catan has?

From August’s Stool Pigeon:

Well, we have it on good authority they were doing New Year’s Day links at the Celeb Glads recording from someone who was there, and now The Traitors has been officially announced for New Years Day. Your move ITV.

Incidentally, I listened to this week’s The Rest is Entertainment on the way to work this morning, I think ROsman is wrong about quiz’s streaming future. I will put my thoughts down this afternoon.

Well French Gladiators coming to TF1 next year is looking pretty good, looks like they have some events we don’t have (clearly a clip of Suspension Bridge, seems crazy we don’t have it in our rotation seeing as we have a set-up for Collision anyway), looks like they’ve retitled The Edge to Vertigo (annoying, but I suppose it’s no different to us renaming Joust Duel and then having a separate event called Joust). There are at least three Glads I’d be quite excited to feel the power of, ahem.

It will be really interesting to see how this does for them, there wasn’t a French version of Gladiators in the 90s so the nostalgia factor won’t be going for them, although doubtless elements of the original American Gladiators will feel familiar through osmosis, and Fort Boyard et al “borrowing” some of the ideas.

It was filmed at Aren’Ice in Cergy-Pontoise (even if it looks like Sheffield!).

Edit: Apparently the embedded link isn’t working so here’s a direct one. The trailer doesn’t seem to be on Youtube yet, which is a shame.

It’s that time of year again: advent (next week) which means that regular Fun Quizzy Sort-Of Advent Calendars will be starting up.

First the one I’m heavily involved with, Dealvent is back, and you have until Thursday to determine which box you’re collectively playing for. Here is the website. I also highly recommend joining the Dealvent Discord as that’s where the game will be playing out live. There are links on the bottom of the Dealvent page.

Then we have Wallvent, Jack Yeo’s incredible advent interpretation of The Wall, of which I am reigning champion. Here is Jack’s Twitter, I do not know if Jack is hosting it elsewhere.

Last but certainly not least Gameshow Herodotus Daniel Hurst is hosting his Advent Calendar of Games, based on House of Games. Some prelim has gone into this already, but you can just rock up on December 1st and playalong. Here is his Twitter, I do not know if he’s duplicating elsewhere.

There may be others! But I’d certainly suggest giving these a go between now and Christmas.

This launched on Max in the US yesterday and it actually looks… quite fun? Kind of a bit like Funhouse but for adults but for a family audience. I don’t know how much staying power it has, how many different games can there be? But it looks like they’ve properly gone for it.

If you like the idea of hamsters doing what they do best in their natural habitat, which is obstacle courses in elaborate sets, we found ourselves watching Major Hamster getting recommended into our Youtube feed quite a lot a little while back.

Likely of interest, David J Bodycombe’s 2003 magnum opus How to Devise a Gameshow is now available on a pay-what-you-like-to-charity basis as an ebook. “Although showing its age in places, it still contains a detailed analysis of game show development that can’t be found anywhere else.”