Today a conglomeration of media conglomerates, including Fox and FremantleMedia North America, announced plans to launch a classic game show network called Buzzr TV—it’s like a traditional quiz show buzzer, you see, but without that fuddy-duddy “E.” Set to debut this summer, Buzzr will draw on Fremantle’s vast store of game show reruns, which most notably includes the Mark Goodson library. Buzzr will air as a digital subchannel on Fox’s owned-and-operated stations in the United States. (To find out if you live in a market with a Fox O&O, see if your Fox affiliate is on this list. Congratulations, Gainesville-area readers!)
With plans to re-air old games like To Tell The Truth, Match Game, Card Sharks, and Monty Hall’s Let’s Make A Deal, Buzzr’s programming will resemble the early days of Game Show Network, which started broadcasting in December 1994 with a similar focus on vintage quizzers. GSN kicked off its first day with a montage, embedded above, that showcased the historical breadth of its shows. (Some of the editing in that montage is amusingly inappropriate, like a flashback to the Equal Rights Amendment juxtaposed with a clip of Chuck Barris’ retrograde wives-vs.-secretaries game show, Three’s A Crowd.) Over the past two decades, though, classics have become less and less of a priority for GSN, to the extent that—aside from the occasional special—they are now relegated to a few hours in the morning. The rest of the channel’s lineup consists mainly of more recent fare like Steve Harvey’s Family Feud, a show in which families euphemize various sexual acts so that Harvey can frown in mock disgust. At least for now, Buzzr looks like it will revive a bygone era in which ringing bells and screaming contestants were the sound of America’s TV afternoons.