Good times on Game Night
Take the Hint is just one of the Password-inspired games within a game in the primetime game show Hollywood Game Night. And if you’re one of the game-show fans who have got a kick out of Game Night these past few weeks, you may want to take the hint and watch this week, before it’s too late.
The season finale is Aug. 29, and chances are it will be a while before Game Night is back.
Hollywood Game Night, hosted by Glee’s Jane Lynch and featuring two teams of four (three celebs and one regular-folk contestant) playing a series of games while trying to distract the others’ attentions, has felt at times as though it’s trapped in a time warp. Each week’s show ends with a bonus round, the Celebrity Name Game, a lightning round in which the winning contestant chooses one of six celebrities to play the game with. The chosen celebrity then describes another celebrity, as best they can, for the contestant to guess. If the contestant can guess 10 celebrities in 90 seconds or less, that contestant pockets $25,000 and their celebrity partner earns $10,000 for the charity of their choice.
Clearly, no one will confuse Hollywood Game Night with Big Brother or The Amazing Race, based on prize money alone, but that’s not the point. The point is to have fun, and hope that you’ll have fun watching at home. That worked in a more innocent time, when Doonesbury cartoonist Garry Trudeau could appear on To Tell the Truth with two impostors and get away with it, or Anderson Cooper, at age nine, could appear on To Tell the Truth as an impostor for another nineyear-old, and the idea of a 24-hour news channel would have been laughable.
Today, though, Hollywood Game Night plays more like an extended version of the Saturday Night Live skit What’s That Name, with Lynch subbing for Bill Hader’s hilariously smarmy, demented game-show host (Dylan McDermott or Dermot Mulroney?). Thursday’s Game Night features a pair of background players from the now-closed The Office, Ellie Kemper and Angela Kinsey, along with Kenan Thompson — a shout-out to SNL — Max Greenfield, Minnie Driver and Kal Penn.
Yes, at times Hollywood Game Night is easy to ridicule and poke fun at. Jeopardy! was always the show for smarty-pants, though. If you just want to kick back and have a hoot at celebrities, you could do worse than to groove to Game Night’s fun vibe. (NBC, CTV, 10 p.m.)
Detectives Flynn (Kristin Lehman) and Vega (Louis Ferreira) take on a murder case involving fratricide where everyone, and not just the brothers involved, appears to have a motive, in a Motive episode that first aired on CTV in May. (CTV, 9 p.m.)
A seemingly routine raid on a grow-op results in Rookie Blue’s Det. Traci Nash (Enuka Okuma) landing her first murder case. Meanwhile, the boys are away for a weekend of male bonding at Oliver’s (Matt Gordon) summer cabin. Rookie Blue may sound like a rote summer potboiler, but Rookie Blue has performed well in the ratings of late, landing in the No. 8 spot for the week of Aug. 5, with 1.2 million viewers in Canada. (Global, 10 p.m.)