Oh, Game Show Network. We’ve grown up together. I remember waking up, parking myself in front of the T.V. and watching grainy reruns of "Card Sharks" and "$20,000 Pyramid" at 9:30 in the morning. Seven-year-old me was an addict and game shows were my fix. It didn’t really matter what game show it was, I would eat it up. From "Win Ben Stein’s Money" to "Lingo" to "Whammy!," I was absolutely in love with the channel and most of its dated programming. To me, these shows were enrapturing and entirely new. Seeing someone’s life change in front of you never gets old, or so I thought.
Flash-forward to today, and I still watch good old GSN. But, I’ve got a few bones to pick with their programming. All the changes they have made are for the worse! They’ve shown the same "Card Sharks" and "$20,000 Pyramid" reruns that I have watched since I was a boy. The whole morning block has not changed a single spot for twenty years! Every day until 2 p.m, the same content cycles over and over, and the exact same episodes go on and on. Bob Eubanks stands at his little podium and asks the contestants if the card he’s about to flip over is “higher than a 7” and somehow it never is.
But things get better after 2, right? That’s when the newer programming comes on. I can get down with some of their original content, like "Chain Reaction" or the strange creature that "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire" has morphed into (The gameplay section of the Wikipedia article for "Millionaire" is many times larger than this article); However, good things never last. Once we hit 4 p.m, I fall headlong into the Harvey-verse.
Hours upon hours of the Steve Harvey version of "Family Feud" follow. There are no survivors. People are asked questions when the answers are clearly sexual, but when they provide a sexual answer, Steve Harvey puffs up and turns blue like that girl from "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory" and castigates them for sabotaging the moral fiber of this country. Every episode someone answers a question with “breasts” or “penis," and Steve Harvey becomes an empty husk staring into the “live” studio audience with his dark eyes bulging, his lips hanging open. It is inescapable. This programming block goes until midnight.
A family can only feature on "Family Feud" five times if they win each time. That seems like enough. But that is not what the people running the GSN schedule have decided. If you want, you can submit your self to the will of Harvey for sixteen straight episodes. The families rise up to the challenge and are dispatched with ease. Fast Money tries men’s souls. The answers blur into themselves. The Castellano family from Oviedo becomes the Howard family from Minneapolis becomes the Barnes family from Salt Lake City becomes the Jones family from Buffalo becomes the destroying, mustachioed maw of Steve Harvey swallowing the entire programming block, small in the blackness of the night, and silencing us all with a gnashing of his teeth.
And then it is midnight and "Cash Cab" is on, and it all repeats again.
