Pyramid scheme

The news about TBS's Pyramid development project got me blabbing at About.com. Some of my bloviations...

Chad Mosher: 6 in 20 [on Donny Osmond's syndie Pyramid] also made perfect rounds much rarer. The focus of the game shifted from "craft 7 great clues in 30 seconds" to "spit out 6 clues as fast as you can." That’s not what Pyramid should really be about.

Guess I didn’t get the memo. I thought Pyramid was exactly about "spitting out clues as fast as you can." At least that’s what the contestants did on every version I’ve seen. There sure weren’t any Millionaire-style half-hour thinks. Not with the clock ticking loudly.

After all, Pyramid is just Password with everything made into the lightning round (and an obvious relaxation of the rules to allow for the speedup). If speed isn’t of the essence in Pyramid, I don’t know what is.

6 in 20 just heightens the challenge, which is fine with me. Pyramid is a freaking fast, difficult game. That’s why I like it so much.

Oh, one other thing. The time format has bounced around over Pyramid’s history. According to Wikipedia (usual caveats) the original limit on CBS was 8 in 30. This was then relaxed on ABC to 7 in 30. For the kid version the limit was further relaxed to 7 in 35. Then Donnymid tightened to 6 in 20.

The recent CBS pilot used 7 in 30. Don’t know what TBS will settle on, if the show ever gets to air. You know, 8 in 30 seems intriguing to me. I like getting the average per-item allowance down under four seconds, but the longer overall time period is also nice.

Ah, we’ll see.

Other poster: Two things just didn’t work with Donnymid–the host (I think he would have been capable, but he needed to watch a bunch of Bill Cullen shows to see how its done) and the too strict rules (ooh, sorry you said football players, not football positions…you lose).

We’ll just have to agree to disagree on Donny. I agree with the Emmy nominators [who gave him a nom for Best Game Show Host in 2003].

As for the rules, yeah, they’ve always been controversial on every version of Pyramid. Last Friday night (actually Saturday morning) I was watching the old Dick Clark 25K Pyramid on GSN.

Henry Polic played brilliantly in the first Winner’s Circle, taking the civvie contestant all the way to the top. Then on the final clue he got buzzed for that $%&^#@! prepositional phrase rule, losing all his hard work. I wanted to gag.

But Pyramid is a tough game. And I sure wouldn’t want to judge it, because of the crushing time pressure.