Bill and Drew

BuzzerBlog has posted the new GSN schedule pdfs for June (see the sidebar). They show a four-a-day for Bill Engvall's new version of Lingo on weekdays: 3:00PM, 8:00PM (first-run), 11:00PM and 2:00AM. The last three runs lead into new times for Drew Carey's ratings-starved Improv-a-Ganza.

On Saturday Drew's non-comedy dud gets a two-hour marathon at 8:00PM, again with Engvall's Lingo as a lead-in at 7:00PM. My reaction from the GSN Schedule board to all this Engvall/Carey double-teaming...

Other poster: Only one person (the same dude who praised Late Night Losers) gave Improv a good review, and its ratings are awful. I would've thought GSN had some sense to pull the plug on the shows that do poorly.

Agree completely. It's definitely Last Chance Gulch for the boring improvisers at 8:30PM. If they continue destroying the network, they won't last long...just like the putrid puppets expired. GSN is leading into Improv-a-Ganza with new episodes of Baggage and Lingo. If that doesn't work, Drew and his non-comedy troupe are gone.

Sure, the two-hour stretch of Improv-a-Ganza on Saturday night is a bad joke, even worse than most of the jokes they improvise on the show. Have GSN execs seen its latest weekend numbers? But the network has to amortize the production costs somewhere. And they're not doing any business on Saturday night, anyway. Maybe they're hoping for a rescue from the Engvall lead-in at 7:00PM.

GSN is relying on Bill to bail out Drew all over the schedule. But that may be too heavy a load, even after Mr. Carey's diet. At least Engvall has some good gameplay going for his show.

RELATED UPDATE: Douglas just posted GSN's numbers for last Tuesday, May 17. They show Improv-a-Ganza again crashing and burning at 8:00PM with 197K viewers. The light-on-laughs wreck also wiped out the remainder of the day for the network. This show is a ratings disaster.