Match Game gets away with a lot on network TV
The show: Match Game, Season 1 The moment: Just . . . all of it “Michael, I told you to rub my hair for good luck,” host Alec Baldwin says to a contestant. “That was a typo. It should be my balls.”
The audience roars. “What would you do with $25,000 if you won?” Baldwin asks Michael.
Panelist Leslie Jones pipes up, “Get someone to rub his” — you can guess what. The audience roars.
Michael loses. “Can I say one thing?” Baldwin asks him. “You didn’t rub my” – you get the idea.
This is what passes for wit on this 1970s game show revamp, where two competitors play fill-in-the-blank with six celebrity panelists, including Jack McBrayer, Cheryl Hines, Josh Charles and Rosie O’Donnell.
And it’s happening on network TV, part of a three-hour, Sunday night block of vintage game shows — the other two are Celebrity Family Feud and $100,000 Pyramid — that ABC is running as counter-programming to the brainier fare that has dominated the night of late (see The Good Wife, or anything on HBO).
The other two shows are less raunchy, but much easier to win than they were in their 1970s incarnations. So successful has this Sunday for Dummies strategy proved, ABC has already renewed it. The guiding principle seems to be, If no one is smart, hey, everyone is!
Even in the ’70s, Match Game was all wink-nudge innuendo. But we live in a crasser world now. When Jones writes the c-word on her answer card, the show’s one nod toward discretion is to blur it on screen. The audience roars. Match Game airs Sundays at 10 p.m. on ABC. Johanna Schneller is a media connoisseur who zeroes in on popculture moments. She usually appears Monday through Thursday.