GSN after Kelly

As the faux tweets noted, GSN programming chief Kelly Goode is leaving the network. At BuzzerBlog Alex Davis posted a nice personal note about Kelly. (I've been pretty hard on Alex lately and he's been pretty hard on me. But credit where it's due.)

Alex also listed a lot of the shows that Kelly helped develop. And, in all honesty, the list mostly tells a tale of failure. Sure, original programming is tough for any cable outlet. Failure is common, success rare. But Kelly did not have a very good batting average.

Predictably, the comments on Alex's post are mostly older-is-better drubbings of any game show less than 80 years old (slight exaggeration). Whether coincidentally or not, the GSN schedule has gotten a lot older recently, with the addition of Regis Millionaire, Whammy and a Clark Pyramid hour to weekdays. Of course, the older-is-better crowd won't be happy until the average age of programming is at least a half-century (again, slight exaggeration).

In the short run, new originals on GSN may be few and far between. Just a natural break in development with the programming chief gone. But in the not so long run GSN needs better demos. Which probably means they'll try originals once again.

As for Kelly's replacement, your guess is as good as mine. Former GSN exec Bob Boden is out as the programming chief at Hub. Hm...

UPDATE: While we're on GSN, this whole new schedule thingie doesn't seem to be working out so swell. Douglas just posted the numbers for Friday, September 2.

I know it was the Friday of a holiday weekend. But the viewer averages were a forgettable 277K/205K prime time/total day. Howie and Regis aren't cutting it in prime time. The pre-2:00PM and post-11:30PM windows shattered (sorry) with 143K and 133K averages. Even early fringe unraveled (sorry again) to a 202K average for 5:00PM-7:00PM.

Not much is performing well and lots of things need fixing.