Ratings: only Meredith smiles

Syndicated game shows mostly got lumps of coal during Christmas week, December 24-30. But Santa brought some goodies for Meredith. She can use the cheerful news. The household ratings for the syndie game shows, according to TVNewsCheck...

Wheel of Fortune 6.7 - down six ticks

Jeopardy 5.9 - down five ticks, the soulmates get an ouchie

Family Feud 4.6 - down a tick

Millionaire 2.5 - up a couple ticks to a season high, yay for Meredith

Baggage 1.1 - flat for Jerry

Despite the falloff during the week, the top two still copped the #2 and #3 slots among all syndies, behind only Big Bang Theory. The viewership averages from TV by the Numbers featured a couple of unusual guests: Wheel of Fortune 10.8 million (weekend repeat 5.5 million), Jeopardy 8.2 million (weekend repeat! 3.8 million), Family Feud 7.0 million, Millionaire! 3.5 million. Nice to see Meredith and weekend Alex in the top 25 for a change.

GSN kicked off 2013 with a more than decent week. Douglas Pucci says the network averaged 335K/274K viewers prime time/total day for December 31-January 6. Steve Harvey's Family Feud took the top seventeen slots. Ridiculous. By the way, Steve's talk show has been renewed for a second season. The bald media conglomerate rolls on.

MAJOR UPDATE: Just saw a large surprise in the Google news cache: Meredith Vieira is leaving Millionaire after this season, her 11th. Wonder what it means for the future of the show, if there is a future. I'll comment some more tomorrow. There's already a lot of speculation around the game show Internets on possible replacements.