Buzzr Repeats

I have noticed that Buzzr is airing the same few episodes of several of the games. From Press Your Luck to Match Game '78 to Tattletales to Body Language. I have caught one episode of Match Game with Gene Rayburn wearing a maple leaf tie 3 straight weeks, starting from the launch. That episode, and the one that follows it air at various points of the day and appear to be repeated at every time slot they air. Was June 1st a soft launch or something? I thought they promoted a library of over 40,000 episodes, but we seem to be initially seeing only a very small portion of the vast Fremantle Media library. Perhaps I'm asking too much, but I've been watching a good amount of TV recently and the repetition on Buzzr is starting to wear a little thin.

I'm only guessing here, but it's likely Fremantle is programming Buzzr that way so that people can tune in at the same time every day and see the next episodes in sequence of each program.

You can't reasonably expect people to be tuning in all day to catch shows every time they air. (And maybe you need to watch a little less than you are.)

Look at it this way: Before GSN started filling their schedule with original programming, they did the same thing ... repeating the same episodes of the classics later in the day, because the audience is going to be different for each airing (your own anomalous viewing habits notwithstanding).

I also find a lack of merit in your argument that we are seeing "only a very small portion" of Fremantle's library. I haven't seen repeats day-to-day, only within the same day. So ... yeah, you are indeed asking too much.

They've repeated episodes of What's My Line from a week or so earlier, as well, in addition to repeating the shows the same day and on Saturday morning at the end of the week. GSM ran the shows from the beginning to the end of the run without repeating.

I get that K.M. Richards, if you miss is at 3, you can watch it again at 8 and so on. Running the same episode at 4 different time slots makes sense, of course, but to see the same two episodes on a Monday, then again on a Thursday of the same week makes little sense to me. And they are not back to back. On Match Game, the panelists are different from the first episode to the following one. Perhaps you're right, I shouldn't be watching so much TV, but given the recent death of my wife of 25 years and my only child having gone to pursue his own dreams and aspirations, now that he's nearly 20, it's a little hard to sit around an empty house after work and not turn on the tube. I mean, how many times can one mow the grass and clean the house? (And maybe you need to keep your glaringly snide comment to yourself when you don't know the facts behind the situation)

I see Oscar has noticed it too. Pay close attention next week, I bet if you watch Match Game, you'll see George Kennedy in that same striped shirt, sitting in the top left corner. It's not like that with all the game shows. Family Feud has been trudging along starting with 1978, having now made it up to 1980 currently.

purpledevil said:

Was June 1st a soft launch or something? I thought they promoted a library of over 40,000 episodes, but we seem to be initially seeing only a very small portion of the vast Fremantle Media library. Perhaps I'm asking too much, but I've been watching a good amount of TV recently and the repetition on Buzzr is starting to wear a little thin.

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I'm thinking 1 of 2 things with this.

1) What you said, perhaps a "soft launch", and they'll add more episodes of shows as they sign agreements with other station groups, or
2) They have only converted so many tapes so far so this is all they have.

purpledevil said:

On Match Game, the panelists are different from the first episode to the following one.

(snip)

Pay close attention next week, I bet if you watch Match Game, you'll see George Kennedy in that same striped shirt, sitting in the top left corner.

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FYI, I have a methodology for watching Match Game reruns. It involves TiVoing the show every day and then watching all five shows for a week as a binge. I did it that way with GSN, and I have been doing it with Buzzr. Right now I am watching the "Wednesday" episode of the panel with Joe Garagiola in the upper left. Buzzr has been running them the same way GSN does, which is to say that two full weeks of shows air in a five-day week ... one after the other, in sequence.

I am tempted to say "You're full of it, sir" but I will wait until all of the next dozen shows air before rendering that judgment. As far as your bet: If next week, June 29 through July 3, Buzzr does run the shows sequentially, then you will stop posting that they don't. If they run them randomly or I see a repeat of any episode from the preceding two weeks, then I will openly validate your position.

Would you like to make George Kennedy's presence a defining factor?

Buzzr debuted a little more than three weeks ago. I have been Tivoing What's My Line. They are already into reruns from two to three weeks ago. It's been repeats all this week from earlier this month. This is not counting that the same show is run twice during the night, or the Saturday morning repeats of two shows from during the week.

C'mon, they've got 18 years worth of shows. GSN didn't do repeats until they went through the full cycle.

K.M. Richards said:

Would you like to make George Kennedy's presence a defining factor?

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Not just his presence, but his striped shirt too.

Oscar Madison said:

Buzzr debuted a little more than three weeks ago. I have been Tivoing What's My Line. They are already into reruns from two to three weeks ago. It's been repeats all this week from earlier this month. This is not counting that the same show is run twice during the night, or the Saturday morning repeats of two shows from during the week.

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It has already been established in history that the B&W episodes are limited in number (which is likely the reason GSN cut back on them and eventually quit running them), so that is not a fair comparison.

purpledevil said:

K.M. Richards said:

Would you like to make George Kennedy's presence a defining factor?

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Not just his presence, but his striped shirt too.

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Fine, then I stipulate that if no Match Game episodes with Mr. Kennedy and his striped shirt air between now and next Friday the 3rd I win and you stop harping about it. If any do air in that time frame, I will publicly accept that as proof you were correct.

I am TiVoing the 10:00 and 10:30am (ET) airings for confirmation.

K.M. Richards said:

It has already been established in history that the B&W episodes are limited in number (which is likely the reason GSN cut back on them and eventually quit running them), so that is not a fair comparison.

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Not true. They have only been running episodes from the period Fred Allen was on the panel. GSM ran episodes from before Steve Allen with Hal Block, all the way through to the final CBS episode. And while the final season was broadcast live (from Studio 50) in color, the kinescopes on GSN were black and white. While they may be missing kinescopes of some episode, Freemantle has a lot more than they've been showing. And GSN did show a lot more, as well.

K.M. Richards said:

Fine, then I stipulate that if no Match Game episodes with Mr. Kennedy and his striped shirt air between now and next Friday the 3rd I win and you stop harping about it. If any do air in that time frame, I will publicly accept that as proof you were correct.

I am TiVoing the 10:00 and 10:30am (ET) airings for confirmation.

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I hardly see how posting one topic on the subject is "harping" on it, but we have an agreement.

Buzzr's Facebook states that "new" episodes start Monday the 29th, so as said before, they appear to be in soft-launch mode.

I'm certainly glad to hear that. As I'm sitting here drinking my first cup of coffee at 5:30am CDT, Family Feud has the Tack family on. Same family that was on all week, week before last. This is the first repeat I've seen on the Feud to this point. Anyone interested enough to watch, note Richard Dawson pointing out that contestant Alan wears the same orange shirt on each episode that he appears. I know that because Buzzr just ran this set of episodes week before last. The Tack family eventually loses to the Hoshi family on day 5. The Hoshis will also win the $5,000 on the same episode they beat the Tacks, by one point. I know because I just saw these episodes two weeks ago.

So, I'm not crazy, which I already knew, and I'm certainly not "full of it" as suggested by Mr. Richards. Not that I ever required nor desired the validation from anything other than my own two eyes, but thankfully the offerings will expand and we'll get to really enjoy the vast library in full.

purpledevil said:

So, I'm not crazy, which I already knew, and I'm certainly not "full of it" as suggested by Mr. Richards. Not that I ever required nor desired the validation from anything other than my own two eyes, but thankfully the offerings will expand and we'll get to really enjoy the vast library in full.

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Sir, you went to great lengths to tell us all about repeats of Match Game episodes which my own two eyes did not see in my own viewing of the channel. And I responded as such.

Given that I never saw the repeats that you did, and you are now seeing repeats of a different show (Family Feud) I put forward this hypothesis, which I hope also satisfies our resident curmudgeon Oscar.

Perhaps Fremantle expected that the audience for Buzzr would arrive slowly. Perhaps not all the stations signed up for it were ready to go on the original launch date, so it was made soft and a decision made to gradually build out the library used for on-air. They may have figured under the circumstances that repeats were going to be acceptable for a short period (obviously not taking into account viewers like you) and as the poster from Harrisburg suggests, they may have been taking their time uploading tapes onto the servers as a result.

Unfortunately, since none of us work there, we'll probably never know who was right about what theory. So I suggest that we convert this thread into a means of tracking when each series goes from repeating a handful of shows to full consecutive airings. Match Game appears to be doing so now -- which you and I will verify with the coming week's shows -- and now we apparently need to keep our eye on Family Feud.

This way, there will at least be a record kept here of how the channel's launch progressed. Okay with you?

I also have been noticing that the 2am - 4am (repeated 4am - 6am) black and white shows have been repeating after only a few weeks after the channel's launch. As said above, it seems Buzzr is only airing some What's My Line? episodes from the era where Fred Allen was one of the regular panelists. Similar repeats are broadcast for To Tell The Truth and I've Got A Secret, the other two black and white shows in the late night line up.

I don't think this was a "soft launch." I haven't heard that they're waiting for more stations to join. They're in all the cities where Fox has at least one outlet. And I believe they have one additional station in California. I'd assume they'd just run the shows in their library in chronological order. If a city joins a few weeks in, they'll pick up at that point and then when the episodes are exhausted, the network will start at the beginning and the city that joined late will see the episodes it missed then.

As said above, Freemantle already had converted these kinescopes to broadcast-ready for GSN. They don't have to re-do it. If GSN isn't airing black and white shows anymore, and really doesn't run much of the color shows Buzzr is running, why should there be a complication in Buzzr running the episodes in order from beginning to end? Not sure there's much quality control if, after only a few weeks, Buzzr is repeating episodes it aired earlier this month.

(By the way, every episode of the black and white shows repeats four or five times during the week anyway. There's one airing of each episode of To Tell The Truth, What's My Line? and I've Got A Secret from Tues. - Sat. at 2am, another at 4am, and a few runs over the weekend. So during the week, every episode already repeats four or five times.)