Who Wants To Be A Millionaire Question

I never heard why Regis stopped doing WWTBAM. Can anyone fill me in?

SoHillsGuy...

ABC stopped ordering prime time versions.

It's really that simple.

Norman Haskins...

Why did ABC want to discontinue prime time shows? I thought it was extremely
popular, and of course cheap to produce. Had it been losing popularity? If
so, why? Because of the consistently weak contestants? Or some other reason?

SoHillsGuy...

The ratings were dropping quite a bit, but it likely had nothing to do
with contestants. ABC ran the series way too much. Instead of keeping
it as a sweeps-month series of specials, they scheduled it several
times a week during the regular season. The novelty wore off, making
it less of a "must see" event. That's the general consensus as to why
it cooled off.

After ABC ran the last batch of "Super Millionaire" episodes (or
whatever they were called), there was talk of doing more, as I seem to
recall. But then came along shows like "Desperate Housewives," "Lost"
and "Grey's Anatomy," and there seemed to be less of a need to go back
to produce more.

I wouldn't rule out the possibility of more being done when ABC needs a
boast.

SoHillsGuy...

I meant to type "boost," but I'm sure running the show again would give
ABC to boast about, as well...

Anim8rFSK...

Because of mismanagement on the part of ABC. They showed it so often
people stopped caring.

KT3000...

It was ABC mismanagement, but I believe over exposure was at best
only a very small factor. IMO the big factor was that just as NBC,
CBS, and FOX didn't understand the secret to _Millionaire's_ success
with their clone shows, neither did ABC. ABC started tinkering with
the DNA to *improve* their golden goose, and instead bronzed it.

The secret to _Millionaire's_ success IMO was it's immediacy and
accessibility. Originally the show was taped the evening it aired
and there was the promise that any viewer could be there on
contestant's row on ABC's tab in as little as 48 hours. All you had
to do was make a phone call, answer a few questions, and be lucky.
You didn't need to have all American good looks, be an "originally
from" living in NYC, or take a vacation to NYC and pray.

But there were problems. Regis and the studio unions didn't like
working evenings and weekends. The contestant mix skewed white
paunchy middle age male. Denigrators argued the questions were too
easy or discriminatory.

Changes were made. The series switched to the game show standard of
taping blocks of episodes in a single day. Contestant selection
switched from the "win your way on" format to a "qualify your way
into a contestant pool" format. The question pool was *broadened*.

By the end it was all gone. If anyone was going to get into big
money ABC's promotion machine gave plenty of advance alert.
Contestants were cast from a monthly pool of 64,000 lucky callers
who got through in the hour or two the lines were open. Questions
drew from such a wide range of experiences and obscure facts
contestants and play along at home viewers were quickly stopped in
their tracks.

Moves such as scheduling episodes later at night out of the family
hour, repeats, and sweeps celebrity editions didn't help either.

David...

Probably because he didn't want to do a second daily show.

Barry Margolin...

He wasn't ever asked to do the daily show, just the evening shows.

Default User...

Where did you hear that? News reports at the time were that he turned
it down:

Speaking of Regis, what ever happened to the new "This is Your Life"
that he said he was going to do last year?

I'd like to think that he was frustrated with the steady stream of
contestants who had trouble getting very far. It seemed you could tell from
Regis' mannerisms that he was frustrated to see contestants struggling over
and missing questions that really weren't very hard. That's the way I felt
too. I was annoyed at the idea that the screening was so terrible that these
sorts of folks kept getting on. To me, the show really wasn't very
interesting until people got over the 8,000 level.