Game Show NewsNet - State of Play

Holiday Returns - December 30

If you've been reading Chico's column this week, he looks at how this year has been a great year. Sure, you have some klunkers along the way, but Chico has celebrated everything that was right with game shows.

This column is going to have none of that.

Instead, we're going to touch on the shows that I'd like to return on the day after Christmas. These are the yearly returns that I'd like to take back and exchange for the hours that I spent watching it. So without further ado, here we go...

My Kind of Town - We were told that this could be the next This is Your Life. Instead, we got the biggest in-joke in the world with an over-hyper host and a lack of story-telling which would question why we should care about these people to begin with it. Eventually, we didn't and the show went bye-bye in a matter of weeks.

Average Joe 4: The Joes Strike Back - The show had one last hurrah featuring an ex-Extreme Dodgeball member, a makeover set which fell extroadinarily flat, and a lady named Anna who looked like she's rather be having root canal than appearing on the show. She winds up picking a Joe, but it really seemed like she didn't like any of them and only picked a Joe to send the show off to the dating world in the hiatus sky to a happy ending.

Stump the Schwab, Season 3 - You all know that I detest this show, however, this is here for a different reason. You may not have known that there even was a season three. ESPN didn't let us know as they threw the whole season under the bus and aired it out of the 3am slot. If you are going to burn a show out, at least let us know that you are going to do it. Shame on ESPN - as much as I hated the show, no show deserves that sort of treatment.

Fire Me Please - Now this show deserved to be run over the bus and be served as road kill. Not only is the premise of trying to get fired before 3pm not funny, but we find that the contestants are actually up and coming comedians - who are also not funny. Just bad all around.

Kept - Jerri Hall wants a kept man to be her personal boy toy. I want an Alka-Seltzer after watching her preening over some of the most vapid men I have ever seen grace my television set.

But Can They Sing - Not only can they not sing, but they don't make entertaining television - with the exception of Bai Ling, who shows us exactly how little you can wear and what disturbing images you can conjure up without getting yanked by the FCC. It's too bad - I would have liked this show to have been yanked by VH1, who should have realized that if NBC didn't want to air this that there was something inherently wrong with it.

I Wanna Be a Hilton - If we weren't interested in shows on people that were to be transformed by people that we did know (Richard Branson, Marc Cuban, Jerri Hall, Tommy Hilfiger), why in the world would we watch a show that features the mother of someone that is more known for causing chaos wherever she goes? I think you would have gotten the audience if the show was 'I Wanna be a Hilton's co-star in her next porn video'. Now THAT'S hot.

The Law Firm - The sad thing is of all of these shows on the list, I wanted to see this one succeed. It certainly had the right elements - and it had David E. Kelley. Unfortunately, it also had really bad cases, 'professional' contestants who made too many mistakes and just terrible execution where in some of these eliminations, you wonder if Roy Black was watching the same case that you were. An assist has to go to the casting crew, who apparently were going more after the personality than the actual brains - I would have rather watched a cast of MAWGs who were dynamite than an eclectic bunch who left their brains in the briefcase.

Who's Your Daddy? - Ironically, the execution wasn't bad on the show. The idea (woman gets $100,000 if she figures out who her adopted father is) was deplorable. This easily gets the Worst Show of the Season award from us at GSNN for good reason...

Strip Search - ...but it's not the show that I hated the most. THIS was. This wasn't a competition as much as it was a dark odyssey into a search for 7 male strippers. The competition was flawed, borderlined on fixed, and there was almost no positive attributes for director Billy Cross. You weren't rooting for people to win as much as you felt sorry for them - and you almost breathed a sigh of relief for the eliminated as they didn't get stuck working for Billy. The lack of a good idea, promising characters or what seemed in my mind to be a fair competition (I got all 7 people right from the get go) makes this the biggest stinker of the year - and the one that I would return most vigorously.

Thank you all for reading my column this year. Please have a very safe holidays so you can hear more of my rantings in 2006.

Gordon Pepper is still upset that he lost the acting role in How The Grinch Stole Christmas to Jim Carrey. Email him at gordon@gameshownewsnet.com.