Two good shows

BuzzerBlog's Alex Davis, still insisting that Dancing With the Stars is a game show, facebooks - is that a verb? - that High Stakes Poker and Chain Reaction will leave the GSN schedule in January. He must have gotten a couple more weeks of the GSN schedule pdfs. So ends the story for two of the network's better originals.

Of course, neither show got much respect from the older-is-better traditionalist bunch who dominate the GSN Internet boards (and most other game show boards on the web). High Stakes Poker, though, got plenty of kudos from the poker press. They appreciated how the show caught the atmosphere of big cash games. Once upon a time HSP was the network's highest-rated show, in both overall ratings and in the advertiser-beloved 18-49 demo.

But the show fell on hard times and was clearly on the way out. I'm slightly more surprised at Chain Reaction getting the heave-ho, but not really too shocked. The network has ground through endless rerun cycles of the show's two seasons. CR could still produce decent numbers, and I often enjoyed my weekend fix of the clever word puzzles. But life...goes...on, as the chain might say.

When Alex posts the schedule pdfs, I'll link to them in the sidebar. He says that Whammy gets CR's 10:00AM weekend slots and Woolery Lingo gets the 3:30PM run. Oh, Jeopardy also gets a night owl slot at 2:00AM. GSN and Jeopardy owner Sony wants to keep Alex's reruns miles away from the access hour, I guess.