Ratings: syndies hardly budge

TVNewsCheck offers some flat and flatter news for syndicated game shows in the week of July 23-29. There was almost no movement in the household ratings for any of the four shows...

Wheel of Fortune 6.0 - flat
Jeopardy 5.1 - down a tick, hey something happened!
Family Feud 3.2 - flat
Millionaire 2.4 - you guessed it, flat

Pretty boring, I know. All four shows did make TV by the Numbers' top 25 syndie list. The viewership averages: Wheel of Fortune 9.3 million (weekend repeat 4.5 million), Jeopardy 7.5 million, Family Feud 4.5 million, Millionaire 3.4 million.

In somewhat related news, a Scripps exec pitched the replacement shows for Wheel and Jeopardy almost apologetically to Wall Street analysts:

Now, for the record, there’s nothing wrong with Wheel and Jeopardy. I have arrived home from work many an evening over the years and enjoyed a bowl of canned soup while Vanna turned the letters and Alex announced the categories.

Yeah, but the letter turning and category announcing have just gotten so expensive. So we're doing these two cheap replacements.

TVNewser posted their usual cable ranker, and the Olympics hurt GSN along with lots of other cable networks. But the damage wasn't horrendous, as the network averaged 306K/239K viewers prime time/total day for the week of July 30-August 5. Not bad by GSN's historical standards. The network ranked 39th and 41st in the windows.