GSN gives Donnymid a try

GSN is trying Donny Osmond's Pyramid for a week at 10:30AM and 3:00AM. I like Donnymid, though the show was always controversial for the tighter time limit, the celebs' sneak peek (in the first season) at the Winners Circle categories, and the allegedly harsher judging. Personally, I thought the judging on every version of the show was pretty draconian, and I liked it that way. Pyramid should be hard. Anyway, I post some comments on the GSN board...

I put the new pdf for May 7-13 on the blog. Alex Davis at BuzzerBlog said the Donnymid run is for only one week because that's what the accompanying GSN e-mail said. But if Donnymid does decent numbers, it will probably stay on the schedule. The 25K Pyramid block is still on Friday night in the new pdf, despite abysmal ratings.

The Donnymid celebs are Liza Snyder and Diedrich Bader (Mon-Wed) and Scott Cohen and Nancy O'Dell (Thu-Fri), by the way. According to the Donnymid episode guide, these eps date from the show's first season.

Other poster: See, I think GSN has it backwards. They should try Donny on Friday nights, and keep Dick Clark on daytime at 10:30, where he still does well.

In the latest published week (April 23-29) 25K Pyramid averaged 218K viewers at 10:30AM. That's not horrible but it's hardly spectacular. And I don't want to think about the demos. Everything on GSN skews old but the pre-1990 shows skew ancient.

Frankly, I think GSN would like to shake up mornings with Steve Harvey's Family Feud. But they're already running that show for all it's worth in early fringe, prime time, and late night. So they'll try Donnymid for a week in the morning and see what happens. There's no doubt the 25K Pyramid block on Friday night has to perform better or it's gone soon.

It's now up to The Nielsen Company...he said portentously.

UPDATE: As a faux tweet notes, GSN will try Donnymid instead of 25K Pyramid on Friday night, May 11. We'll see if this move lasts for a while.