Testing, testing

As a follow-up to yesterday's post on Scripps' replacement game show Let's Ask America, I rummaged up a story from the company's hometown Cincinnati. Scripps insists that saving money isn't the only motive for replacing Jeopardy and Wheel of Fortune on its stations.

Well, okay. I have my doubts. But one other item in the story caught my attention. "[Scripps exec Bob] Sullivan said Let’s Play America drew the highest test scores of the nine potential game shows on which Scripps secured options. Sullivan thinks it will draw a younger audience than the game shows it replaces."

We'll see about those demos. Despite the Skype gimmick of contacting contestants at their homes, the show looks like a pretty traditional quizzer. And those critters generally don't skew anything but old. But here's the thing. Scripps apparently ground through testing no less than nine game show projects before settling on Let's Ask America.

If you gonna displace two of the highest rated syndies in the business, maybe you should test a lot. But there might be some paralysis by analysis here. All that testing may have just produced the most innocuous project, not the one with the biggest potential. The gamble begins September 17, at any rate.