I was listening to this Tuesday’s The Rest Is Entertainment this morning on the way to work – I’m a couple of days behind, but I was aware there was some discussion on the future of quiz shows. TV’s Richard Osman (one-time creative head of Endemol UK, knows what he’s talking about) was very positive about the future and its streaming potential. I (amateur industry critic, was on Weakest Link once), have consistently thought the future of quiz shows is pretty bleak and nothing has really changed my opinion. And here are some reasons why.
- Discoverability and inertia. If you’re a quiz in daytime getting your consistently strong ratings, you have it relatively easy. Daytime is about routine, you switch on your channel at the same time and the same show comes on. Occasionally channels will try something else in the shot which is incredibly annoying, numbers go down, if the show is good sometimes they go back up again but you don’t actually have to do much as a viewer to discover these new shows, it’s more passive. If you want to find a new show on a streaming service, you’ve got to actively go and look for it. When people are paying a tenner a month or whatever for a service, they’re not going to go out of their way to watch a quotidian quiz show, which they will have no idea even exists unless Netflix starts blanket advertising its existence, they’ll usually want a drama or something big scale, something that feels worth your time and investment. Is anyone in their day to day life going out of their way to watch and talk about Are You Smarter Than A Celebrity? No they are not. Even something pretty good like Netflix’s Cheat comes along, which you could have put on terrestrial and probably would have done OK but unspectacularly, it barely moves the dial – in fact it was pretty much the worst original performer on the service for several weeks. Older people might be timeshifting Only Connect (370k in catch-up in the latest Thinkbox), but they’re not timeshifting Alan Carr’s Picture Slam (82k), or The Hit List (52k) or The Chase (33k, 34k, 69k, 43k, 63k).
- Localisation. To be clear here, we’re talking about quiz shows, there will always be space for competition and unscripted on TV, mainly because there is something pretty universal about falling in love, voting people off, and trying to tell if a handbag is a handbag or if the handbag is actually cake. Quiz, however, is not quite universal. Sure, the idea of getting the question right and winning a prize is, but a quiz where the material appeals to everybody in the world is a quiz where the material appeals to nobody in the world. Early questions on Millionaire, The Chase et al tend to be about local cultures, phrases, sayings, TV shows because that’s where the audience is, I would expect anyone from the UK to struggle with the first five questions of Romanian WWTBAM even if they were translated into English, for example. In streaming terms this isn’t great, either your show is full of international slop (“what’s the capital of France?”) or you limit your audience who probably won’t be bothered enough to find it anyway, and then it doesn’t do well enough to spin-off into other local versions.
- Business. At least with Netflix and Amazon you still get paid to make the thing. If as suggested, you try and make a show for Youtube or TikTok presumably you’d need to front up the money for the entire series first then hope that a) people find it and b) there’s enough of a long tail that you’d make your money back in the long term. I’m just looking at some of the viewing figures for older shows currently on ITV Studios’ Puzzle channel – An episode of Pick Me with 2.8k views. Eggheads averaging about a thousand. Ooh, an episode of Sitting on a Fortune is up to almost six thousand after two months. How long is it going to take you to make a return on those sorts of figures? Sure, clips from shows do well, but they’re minutes long and you know exactly what reaction is expected of you going into them. And sure, “guess the X from the emoji” quiz videos are viral and popular, but they’re not television are they?
- Interactivity. Everyone thinks they want this, by episode two you’re happy enough to just shout at the television. It is already a lot of effort scrolling through the list of shows to get to the one you want. If I want to interact with the TV, I’ll turn my PlayStation on.
So having said all that let’s end on a potential counter example. Pop Culture Jeopardy starts next Wednesday on Amazon Prime. Everyone knows what Jeopardy is. They haven’t extended it to an hour (as far as I know). It’s not the first online spin-off they’ve done, they did Sports Jeopardy on Crackle which they did three runs of, this is at least about something that possibly has broader appeal. I understand it will be watchable in the UK. If that can’t do anything, what chance do you think your Quizzy Settlers of Catan has?
I think I’ve said this all before, but…I agree with every word you wrote here.
At one point, I considered myself lucky that my primary obsession ended up being game shows – that’s (A) an entire genre (as opposed to one show, and what do you do when that show is canceled) and (B) a genre there will always be lots of as they’re cheap to make.
That’s what I thought at the time, but then Netflix (and similar streaming services) happened.
I can’t say I am looking forward to the day linear TV dies and game shows die with it, but that day is coming within a few years.
There was an article in The Times recently about the state of the TV industry as a whole, the amount of people out of work, how broadcasters won’t take risks on shows that streamers will etc. If you want to check out the non-paywalled version, here you go: https://web.archive.org/web/20241127104526/https://www.thetimes.com/article/3aa199d0-33bf-4928-9ee5-d15b2b34832a
Where quiz fits in, if you are a fan of the genre then the last 25-30 years have been fantastic because of so many new shows but the market got overcrowded. It’s sometimes forgotten but the types of shows that quiz/game/competition formats replaced in the schedules are the kind of stuff people are going to the streamers for. I don’t think streamers are the problem – broadcasters over here wanted to make shows of their own but the schedules became less varied than before. Afternoons on the BBC and ITV used to be kids shows so that’s another area where quiz rightly or wrongly took over. But ratings were great so that’s all that mattered.
For the daily shows that Richard Osman is talking about, I’m sure he is well aware but didn’t mention it, ITV have been heavily reliant on repeats in the last year or so and the quiz block itself has been reduced at times and become less varied. His “6 quiz shows in one day rating over 2m” is a nice soundbite but highly selective and we seem to be moving away from GK Q+A shows. 2023 was a bad year and IMO 2024 has been worse – there’s been The Answer Run and Jeopardy. I suppose there is Bullseye still to come… but, overall, disappointing. I’m not sure there will be a great demand for Pictionary, and the most popular of the genre 1% Club and Traitors (which aren’t quizzes anyway) won’t be around forever. Gladiators has probably peaked. Apologies for concocting such depressing reading but when it comes to the ever-reliable quizzers quiz, broadcasters aren’t commissioning them. Sadly, I can’t see a Millionaire type hit coming along and changing things again.
BB, agree with everything you say about quiz shows on streaming.
While realistic, the doom and gloom around these parts does get old. I have confidence that this genre can adapt to the new entertainment market, it will look a lot different, yes, but something will come along eventually that will be a huge hit and breath new life into the quiz show world just as Millionaire did when the genre was ailing at the tail end of the 90s.
I agree that streaming and new media, in their current forms, aren’t a good fit for the traditional game show.[1]
I do feel a bit more positive about the genre’s future than yourself, though.
I see streamers increasingly making their platforms more like linear TV to capture an audience and improve discovery of less essential shows. It feels like we’re not far off them having “Watch live” put front-and-centre focusing on these sorts of shows, alongside live events, for more passive watching alongside their on-demand offerings. The technology wasn’t really there a decade ago but FAST channels have shown it’s possible and probably inevitable. I do think there’s something fundamentally compelling about a linear TV-style experience.
I also see game shows as one of linear broadcast television’s strengths. It’s a platform that, while waning, still reaches huge numbers of people – it’s tempting to write off anything in decline as dead even when they are still reaching millions. I see game shows, alongside news and magazine shows, as the cockroaches that will survive once broadcast TV is a wasteland otherwise due to their low-cost, repeatable, consistent and localised nature. Mastermind and Countdown will probably outlive us all.
Discovery is a huge problem for all media across every platform. There’s just too much stuff competing for your time and it’s hard to cut through. This has made long-running stalwarts like The Chase, Pointless, House of Games etc more valuable. Traditionally, broadcast has been able to use scheduling to help discovery, but it’s tricky when the biggest hits like The Chase can’t be moved or have unmoveable lead-outs and you don’t have many other big shows that you can use to promote something new.
It does feel we’re past a golden age but there’s still a lot being made
and it still feels like it’s in a healthier place than the rest of the TV ecosystem, even if it’s frustrating so little is new and compelling, not helped by things like ITV’s apparent legacy format mandate.
[1] A fixed mostly standalone formatted show, rather than serialised competition, reality or panel show.
I feel like that something would have to fundamentally change about quiz shows for them to be successful in a streamer.
My thoughts are always coming back to Ch£at on Netflix – I believe it would have done pretty well on daytime TV, but on a streamer it kind of doesn’t make sense – you see that there’s twelve episodes, you pick the first one to watch, you watch through it, and then you either go away or watch another one, by which point you realize that it’s the exact same show again, just with different people. You maybe watch through one or two more episodes, and you’ve seen all you needed to see. It’s not exactly bingeable, and it’s not something that you would go out of your way to watch more of.
With linear TV, it’s also pretty easy to ease yourself into jumping into the middle of a series – you just watch episode 387 of Pointless, because that’s all there is to see on BBC One on a particular day. With streamers, however, it’s difficult not to go from Series 1 Episode 1, because that’s how the rest of the platform works. If the rest of your friends (or, more likely, the social medias) are talking about, say, episode 9, it can feel daunting to slog through eight exact same episodes of a show, or annoying and embittering to skip from episode 2 to 9 and lose the neatness of watching everything in a row. Perhaps a ‘random episode’ button would work nicely with that? Or as part of FAST channels, like described in comments above.
What’s also interesting to note is that TV shows adjacent to game shows, like reality TV, are still doing well on streamers – and with how surprisingly successful Deal or No Deal Island has been, I could see game shows and reality shows being blended more and more in a streaming world – perhaps as games lasting a whole season instead of one episode. (On that point, ironically, I always thought Cash Trapped would work even better on a streamer than it did on ITV)
Anyway, to concur with the commenters above, game shows aren’t going anywhere, but they will most likely transform and change into something unlike a linear TV quizzer. Someone will strike gold eventually, you’ll see.