Great news! Game Show Network in the US premiered Beat the Bridge last night and they’ve put up an episode – a different one – on Youtube. Pretty much all strategy has been removed, there’s basically no risk until someone makes two mistakes, it’s only getting the third that ends the round and halves the money which the rest of the team can mitigate with their emergency button. Pathfinding is not an issue, it’s basically a set of seven (plus replacement) Dis or Dat (or Dother) questions throughout, the final is closer to the end game from Trivia Murder Party in its writing than the original, rather than statements it’s “which of X, Y or Z fits the category?” Charitably we will say there’s not much messing about, they fit four bridges and the final within a 20-minute runtime, less than half the UK one, so you’re getting quite a lot of questions and decision making at a decent clip. Cameron Matheson is, er, enthusiastic. The money is quite irritating in that the values on offer aren’t quite round and most of them don’t divide neatly between three people unless you get the $15,000 maximum, uniquely figured out to be aggravating to contestants and viewers alike.

No I’ve no idea why the thumbnail shows a different team to the one playing either.

I’ve heard it’s a bit like Race Across The World meets The Traitors!!!!! I mean, it’s like neither of those shows, but still.

You’ve got until 31st August to apply, filming takes place October/November.

If you’re at a loss for something to watch this weekend it’s the annual charity 24 Hour Gameshow Marathon for Child’s Play, starting 5pm UK on Saturday. The link to the Twitch stream, the donation page and the line-up can be found at gameshowmarathon.com, there are a couple of interesting sounding combos I’ll be looking out for, Canadian classic The Mad Dash (really hope they’ve got a proper set for that) followed by The Bank Job, and a bit later The Floor followed by Tipping Point. All those in the back half with added exhaustion jeopardy (normal Jeopardy! is 10pm UK).

The CW’s forthcoming adaptations of Trivial Pursuit and Scrabble are recording at Television Centre 18-23rd June and 2nd-7th July and interestingly they’re after paid audience members, three sessions a day, £50 a session. The fact they’re recording three hour-long (I think) shows a day suggest it won’t get too onerous or too out of hand, probs 3 hrs once they know what they’re doing. If any of that is interesting to you you can apply for tickets via SRO. Neither have hosts officially named yet, although LeVar Burton has been associated with Triv in the recent past.

People have asked if these shows being recorded here mean we have domestic versions on the cards: not as far as I know, the US has a habit recently of filming shows in other territories to save a bit of money particularly Ireland and Australia. How much they’re saving by coming to London of all places will probably remain a mystery.

Edit: Triv is LeVar Burton and Scrabble is Raven-Symoné, thanks Aaron.

But! The first date for Deal or No Deal 2024 has been released and it’s June 24th, Maidstone, tickets ApplauseStore.

Something potentially quite interesting coming up, popular Youtube troupe Sidemen will be running their own reality show on Youtube from June 2nd to June 9th, Inside, where ten celebs will stay in a house for week to vie for a prize of up to £1m. Decisions, challenges and eliminations will determine if the pot goes up or down, and the winner of the final head-to-head wins the lot.

It will be interesting to see what bypassing the traditional TV model does for this, the group have a massive following and it’s not the first time they’ve dipped their toes into this sort of water. Their main Youtube channel is here.

Earlier I was thinking to myself “hmm, we must be due the next tranche of Netflix stats quite soon,” spookily enough they were released an hour earlier. Spooky. You can download them from here if you want.

Like last time I have to wrack my brains a bit to remember what of interest was released in the back half of last year, and it’s worth pointing out that these numbers only take that window into account, so something released middle of December will have little chance to accumulate compared to something released 1st July. Here are the highlights from the first set of numbers that were released for Jan-June 2023. Let’s have a look and see what the new numbers bring – of new interest is “amount of viewers” which is just the hours watched divided by the series runtime, we can’t know how many people dropped off a series, but if you’ve watched most of it you’re probably watching all of it. Also this is *just* the TV shows list, films have their own page.

Squid Game Challenge (released 22/11/23) – 270.6m hrs, 33.1m viewers
Making Squid Game: The Challenge (6/12/23) – 1.5m hours, 3m viewers
The Devil’s Plan (26/9/23) – 72.4m hrs, 5.4m viewers
Zombieverse S1 (8/8/23) – 29.6m hrs, 4m viewers
Is It Cake Too? (30/6/23) – 98.5m hrs, 16.8m viewers
Is She The Wolf? S1 (11/6/23) – 6.8m, 800k viewers
Muscles and Mayhem (that American Glads doc) (28/6/23) – 19.3m hrs, 5.4m viewers
Too Hot to Handle S5 (14/7/23) – 111.4m hrs, 13.5m viewers
The Big Nailed It! Baking Challenge S1 (4/8/23) – 28.5m hrs, 3.7m viewers
The Ultimatum: Marry or Move On S2 (23/8/23) – 76.8m hrs, 10.4m viewers
Love is Blind S5 (22/9/23) – 155.7m, 14.1m
Single’s Inferno S3 (12/12/23) – 49.5m hrs, 5.6m viewers

What counts as ‘good’? There are of course different expectations for different shows, and of course some shows on the list will have a time advantage over others. However as an *extremely quick and dirty* metric, I’ve stripped the spreadsheet to a) only Netflix originals, b) must be available globally, c) must have come out between July and end of September, i.e. the first three months of the period.

There are 97 shows that fit that criteria. The 49th show, the median on the list in terms of hours viewed is in fact The Big Nailed It Baking Challenge Season 1, released 4/8/23, 28.5m hrs, 7:48 run time, 3.7m viewers. The median in terms of “amount of views” is Kohrra: Season 1, released 15/7/23, 30.9m hrs, 6.4m viewers. The mean average for the selection, rounded to three sig figs, is 68.6m hrs, 9.87m viewers. 19 shows recorded over 100,000,000 hrs.

We can also look at what was featured in the previous highlights and see what they’ve added in the subsequent six months:

Physical 100 S1 added 22.7m hrs to the 235.0m it got last time.
Siren: Survive the Island added 3.8m to the 11.7m it got last time
Cheat S1 added 1.0m to the 6.5m it got last time.
Too Hot to Handle Germany S1 added 8.4m to the 42.6m it got last time.
Love is Blind S4 added 44m to the 229.7m it got last time.
Dance 100 added 2.2m to the 16.6m it got last time.

Is there anything interesting from the latest stats we’ve missed? Let us know in the comments.