Chico:  Hey there.... I'm Chico Alexander and I think Nigel Lythgoe is the scariest thing to come from Britain since mad cow disease. Your thoughts, Gordon?
Gordon: I think that you've been hanging out in his kitchen a little too long for my liking. I'm Gordon Pepper, and from somewhere in Nigel's kitchen, WLTI.... is on. Let's get cracking now with the top stories of the day, including the end of the Jeopardy Tournament of Champions, where for the second straight year, a bad wager costs someone the match. But first - last week's Big Five. Let's wrap this bad boy up,. Chico, the results?
Chico:  Okay, to review, the subject: Biggest Show in the past five years. Number five... Street Smarts! Number four... The Amazing Race! Number three... WPT. Going to number two... Greed! Precisely 13 % of those polled feel the need.
Gordon: And the #1 game is....WIN CHICO ALEXANDER'S PANTS!!!!
Chico:  Heel.
Gordon: (whimper, whimper, whimper)
Chico:  That said, the biggest game, with 57% of the vote. No surprise... Who Wants to Be a Millionaire!
Gordon: Not a surprise at all, as that's the quizzer that brought back the game show genre to prime time TV. The shows that won were the most influential in the group, so I'm not surprised - you?
Chico:  Not a bit. Also speaks to the tastes of the general audience of the site. Notice that the best and the worst shows were studio based.
Gordon: This seems to be a studio based crowd - but they also reward good reality shows too, like Amazing Race and WPT.
Chico:  Hey, give credit where credit is due. People don't watch shows because of a genre. They watch because they're good.
Gordon: That's very true, and based on the crowd, one of the shows they watch is Jeopardy - which leads us to...
Chico:  I'm getting there, I'm getting there...Okay, I'm there now. It's tourney time. Last week, we saw one of the most contested finals in quite a  while, you had Arthur Gandolfi who was first out the gate but ended up with zero in the half... Tom Walsh, who set the record for championships before someone else came along and broke it...And Russ Schumacher, who was a wild card. And in the end, who wins all the cheddar? The Wild Card.
Gordon: What was more exciting was the way he won it. Russ comes back from a first day deficit to win everything, but ironically, it was Walsh's to lose - which he promptly lost when he didn't bet enough money on the Final Jeopardy question. What happened?
Chico:  Simply put, he held back. You don't want to hold back at the end of the final... You know, you have to go whole hog. Ensure your lead, because you know, someone else might sneak in and before you know it... Surprise!
Gordon: I don't understand what Tom was thinking. He bet not to try to win it, but to hope that Russ would lose it. In the words of Jets coach Herman Edwards, You play to win the game! Tom gets my nomination as dumbass of the week.
Chico:  Definitely the worst week ever for him... which is an interesting segue into... *mock fanfare* this week's Big Board. Conveniently entitled
"Worst Week Ever".
Gordon: Tom didn't have an awful week - he did get $50,000 - but he let $200,000 slip out of his fingers, so I would say he gets to go on the list.
Chico:  Staying with J! for a moment, it's the worst week ever for Anne Boyd, who lost her semi by only one dollar, when she too made the fatal error of betting nothing on a correct final Jeopardy! answer.
Gordon: Anne gets on the list. Let's add Jennifer C. from the Apprentice, as she showed us how NOT to lead a team in a restaurant exercise.
Chico:  Worst week ever if you happen to be a middle finger on Jennifer Cristafulli's hand. Also showed America the quickest way for you to get fired, as she brings in her two evicts Stacy and the Elizabeth for nothing more than personal vendettas. Add that to the fact that her real employer is now trying to get as far away from her as humanly possible for her remarks regarding some of her clientele...
Gordon: Yep - not a good week for her. Also a really bad week for decent comics, as Dat Phan, Ralphie May, Kathleen Madigan and Jay London are toast. I'll put them on now, but we'll get more into this later on in the show.
Chico:  A pretty crappy week for anyone who happened to face Greg Wolf in Friday's On the Cover, as he amassed a record-shattering score and basically made the game un-winnable for his opponents.
Gordon: Also a really bad week for Mia and John P, as they get the heave-ho from Survivor. Any chance that the age alliances will be broken?
Chico:  Short-unfulfilling answer... no.
Gordon: Agreed.
Chico:  Definite worst week ever of many more to come for any broadcast primetime non-Mark Burnett reality series. Anything other than Survivor or The Apprentice has either seen a decline in viewership or a decline in quality. You'd be hard-pressed to find an exception... And yes, Gordon, that WAS a challenge.
Gordon: There's a simple answer for that - EVERYTHING is down, ratings-wise across the board. The television ratings for almost every single show, including non-game shows, is down 20-25% from last year, and only a handful of shows are stagnant, if not up.
Chico:  Couldn't find one, could you?
Gordon: On the contrary, The second episode of ANTM3 actually increased over the first show and while other shows didn't benefit from moved time slots (The Apprentice) or being matched up against specials. We had a similar panic last year, as we all remember, the Apprentice had to be moved out of the way of American Idol and everyone cried that the Donald would have a huge flop on his hands. We had the same crisis with AI3.
Chico:  And now, it's getting killed by CSI. How about that for irony =p
Gordon: It's not getting killed by CSI, It's losing by a small margin and everyone is panicking.
Chico:  But you're also talking a year-to-year drop, not just up against one particular show or in one particular slot, but for the series as a whole.
Gordon: Almost EVERY show right now is facing a drop, not just the primetime game shows. There's NO reason to panic. You have an election year, you have a very exciting baseball season where people are going out and watching the games - not to mention the NFL games - and those demographics are out doing those things instead of watching TV. Reality series ratings always go back up during the run of the show. I don't expect the trend to change now. Once the start of November happens, everything will go back to normal.
Chico:  Or you could switch over to ESPN and watch hockey players... not doing much.
Gordon: We  will reopen this discussion in November. Meanwhile, we'll open up the room for Alex Davis as we get some Accuacy or Idiocy - right after this...

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