Globex Corporation Newsletter

Damn it, I love TV gameshows. And I don't just mean the good ones like Jeopardy! (perhaps the greatest TV show of all time, forget about genre). I'll watch any gameshow at least once. Yeah, some of them suck. Remember The Joker's Wild? I used to watch it with my college roommate every night before supper. We went through a span of like two months without getting a question wrong. The questions were so easy that the game relied soley on luck. Why even bother to ask questions?

I've seen some of TV's most surreal moments on gameshows. I remember the week (and no, I'm not making this up) that G. Gordon Liddy was on Password. I met Liddy about a year later (scary, scary guy) and all I wanted to ask him about was his week on Password. Or was it Super Password? I don't remember now, though it was hosted by Bert Convy.

Bert Convy. As near as I can tell, Bert Convy was famous for being on television. It's a circular argument. "How do you get on television?" - "By being famous." - "How do you get famous?" - "By being on television." Somehow Bert Convy, Alex Trebek, Peter Marshall, Bob Ewebanks, Wink Martindale, Pat Sajak, Richard Dawson, Gene Rayburn, Tom Bergeron, That Bitch from The Weakest Link, Peter Tamarkin, Chuck Woolery and many others have all managed to get famous by simply hosting a gameshow.

And Chuck Barris. He got rich by coming up with ideas for gameshows. OK, he also wrote Freddy "Boom Boom" Cannon's 1960's top 40 hit Palisades Park and apparently also assassinated folks for the CIA, but he made most of his fortune in gameshows.

Ken Jennings got rich and famous by being on a gameshow. The guy is writing books now. The fact that any of us know his name right now is amazing to me. And it's all because of a gameshow.

Now I'm talking gameshows, not reality crap. Reality shows often try to pass themselves off as gameshows. There is a game and it's played on a TV show, but that's not what people are tuning in for. They're tuning in to see people act like morons to win a damn prize. Ken Jennings was a geek, but at least he had some dignity. Survivor rewarded a tax evader for being naked for a couple of weeks. Inane.

Nope, give me a real gameshow any day.

BOJ