Another lost weekend

The weekend numbers continue to come in lousy for GSN. After Douglas posted the Saturday July 16 ratings, I yelped on the GSN Schedule board.

Saturday 7/16 just went up and prime time was about as bad as expected. The averages: 155K/199K prime time/total day. Improv-a-Ganza and poker did a number on the, er, numbers. Top ten...

3:30PM Family Feud (O'Hurley) 443
10:30AM Family Feud (O'Hurley) 351
11:30AM Catch 21 329
3:00PM Family Feud (Karn) 327
4:00PM Newlywed Game 310
12:00PM Million Dollar Password 304
11:00AM Newlywed Game 298
10:00AM Chain Reaction 292
6:30PM Lingo (Engvall) 290
9:30AM Whammy! All New Press Your Luck 269

Bubble show was 7:00PM Lingo. O'Hurley had a nice day on what was not a good day overall for the network. Things just hit the wall at 8:00PM thanks to you-know-what. Well, at 2:00PM, too. Maybe syndie Deal of No Deal can help a little in that slot. And at 4:30PM Love Triangle crushed the network. It was hard for GSN to get anything going for the day. At least weekend warriors Regis and Whammy delivered.

Other poster: Also, maybe it wouldn't be a bad idea to cut back the Lingo marathon by two episodes or so. It didn't bomb, but it wasn't that great either.

Frankly, Engvall wasn't the problem. He got the three best numbers from 4:30PM on. Total day would have looked even worse without that admittedly overdone two-hour marathon. Improv-a-Ganza and Love Triangle just hammered the network in the afternoon and the schedule never really recovered. And things completely collapsed when Drew hit again at 8:00PM, followed by poker.

Morning and early afternoon were fine, and the Karn-O'Hurley-Sherri combo recovered some ground after 2:00PM Improv-a-Ganza. But it was tough to keep things going. That's why Drew has now been replaced at 2:00PM.

It's getting harder and harder to justify any but the most limited slots (or any slots at all) for Improv-a-Ganza and High Stakes Poker. GSN might as well go with basically their weekday schedule on weekends...except for the current weekend morning and early afternoon sched, which is performing pretty well. Late night needs to be fixed on both weekdays and weekends, mainly by getting rid of Improv-a-Ganza and poker.

But the gloom on weekends shouldn't obscure the fact that GSN has now recovered pretty nicely on weekdays, except for the obvious late night problem. Things are looking a lot better compared to when Drew and Wendy were killing weekday prime time.