When one does what I’ve been doing as long as I have been doing it one has to accept the reality that no matter how cock-sure and certain one may be about a potential outcome there will be times when our prognostications will be proven to be dead wrong. It’s happened to me probably hundreds of times over the course of my career, which I’d contend still constitutes a fairly good track record. When it does happen, I’m always hopeful that in hindsight I can discern more about why I was wrong and at least turn my mistake into a learning experience. In the case of one otherwise obscure little game show, for the life of me I still can’t fathom how or why this was the case.
Perhaps a handful of you might recall last fall I mused about a debuting syndicated offering called SCRAMBLED UP. It was statistically one of my most-viewed works of 2025 (admittedly a low bar), so at least in this case my assumption might be justified. Based upon what I knew about where the show was being scheduled–or not–and my own extensive experience with shows with similar footprints, I was emphatic in my prediction that the folks that fought the good battle to get it on the air at all should start planning their next move. I even dredged up the memory of Norman Lear to provide such counsel.
As the year unfolded, the ratings information I had access to seemed to point in my direction toward being an accurate prognisticator for once. SCRAMBLED UP jockeyed for and in many cases played in concert with other second-tier game shows including two from CBS Media Ventures, FLIP SIDE and THE PERFECT LINE, Byron Allen’s pet project FUNNY YOU SHOULD ASK and the FOX first run survivor 25 WORDS OR LESS. With minimal variance, the CBSMV duo, buoyed by additional runs on Game Show Network, regularly delivered more than six times the Nielsen household rating of SCRAMBLED UP. They share similar production values, venues, prize budgets and talent level for their emcees.
So imagine my stunned reaction when DEADLINE’s Denise Petski posted this story last week:
The nationally syndicated word game show Scrambled Up has been renewed for a second season. Shooting is underway in Atlanta on 160 new half-hour episodes, bringing the sophomore series’ total episode count to 320. It’s set to premiere on September 14….The game show will launch its second season in more than 20 new cities, including Orlando, Cincinnati, Minneapolis and Honolulu, putting it in more than 85% of the U.S. It has also received time slot upgrades in 40-plus markets, according to producers.
With all due respect to cities with as much to offer as those listed above, none of them are consequential enough to materially impact Nielsen ratings. And considering the time slots they launched with–not to mention the lack of any significant larger markets or recognizable stations in even a press release–my experience with such hyperbole would surmise that the lion’s share of those other upgrades Petski referenced likely involved moving from the middle of the night on a digital subchannel to daytime on a My Network station. Again, much ado about just about nothing.
So how in the wide, wide world of sports did these guys actually pull this off?
Well they do have their own nationally (well, globally) distributed overlay in the form of a dedicated FAST channel on Samsung TV Plus, which runs the episodes (and, we would surmise) the advertising on a continuous loop. Earlier this year MEDIAPOST’s Wayne Friedman shared exactly how ubiquitous it is:
Samsung TV Plus — the smart TV operating platform — now has more than 100 million monthly active users (MAUs) across Samsung TV, Samsung Galaxy phones, XR headsets, Galaxy Tab, Smart Monitor and Family Hub platforms. In late 2024, Samsung said it had 88 million MAUs…Samsung’s streaming hours have increased 25% over 2025.
That said, SCRAMBLED UP’s degree of competition in this ecosystem is a helluva lot more daunting than what they face in the linear world as Friedman further noted:
Samsung TV Plus currently has over 4,300 streaming channels — all for free — available across 30 countries. In the U.S., it has more than 700 (Free Ad-Supported). The platform also offers video-on-demand.
Those 100 million might indeed be watching a lot more content, but knowing what we know about how many viewers–especially those who stick around for more than a couple of minutes–individual FAST channels draw, the likelihood of a measurable amount of those 100 million MAUs watching Michael Yo on any given day is in my mind about as remote as the chances I firmly believed they had to make it to season two.
But VARIETY’s Mya Copeland may have provided the smoking gun for this nagging mystery in her writeup:
’Scrambled Up’ is exactly the kind of smart, joyful, highly playable show that belongs in the daily game-show conversation,” says Michael Eisner, founder of The Tornante Company, one of the show’s producers. “The entire team has built a format that is instantly accessible and genuinely fun, and Michael Yo is an outstanding host whose warmth, timing and energy make viewers want to play along every day.”
Yes, that would be the very same gentleman who once chaired the Walt Disney Company and who was Barry Diller’s one-time fellow boy wonder coming up through the ranks at ABC and eventual arch-rival in the studio and especially the children’s television game. I was specifically banned from doing any business with or even speaking to Eisner when Diller decided to start the FOX Children’s Network in what amounted to a hissyfit when Disney purchased Los Angeles Channel 9, rebranded it to KCAL and clawed back their top-rated Disney Afternoon product from our stations in the one local market he actually cared about. The in-press sparring that resulted between those two was as epic as anything one would see these days out of the camps of WWE or UFC, or for that matter the daily Oval Office press conferences.
Both now 84, those holy wars are well in the rear view mirror. Both men have been compensanted well enough over their course of their impressive careers to have enough FU money for several lifetimes. Exactly one week ago Diller was laying out his vision for his recently acquired and rebranded People, Inc. at the World’s Best Summit on the very morning that Eisner was humble-bragging about SCRAMBLED UP. Diller recently published a best-selling memoir, is still basking in his ability to restore beauty and sanity to Chelsea via the High Line, and is looking to make a WHITE LOTUS-type program using those publishing assets, as THE MEDIA MIX’s Claire Atkinson reported. Eisner’s putting his money into a game show that ironically still doesn’t occupy a time slot on the primary signal of the very station he once obsessively personally programmed when his company owned it.
So much like his fellow billionaire Allen, Eisner’s funding a game show with little regard or concern about silly things like ratings, profitability and competition. There are scant few projects of any kind being offered in first-run syndication and more than enough shelf space in a seemingly limitless digital landscape for shows like theirs to continue on as long as they want. FUNNY YOU SHOULD ASK will soon commence production of its tenth season, and adding in its availabilities on Allen’s diginets like The Grio is almost as ubiquitously available as any Samsung TV Plus channel. In that light, SCRAMBLED UP making it to year two isn’t all that shocking after all.
You won’t find me making any more dire predictions for SCRAMBLED UP this year. And I suppose I could still be picking crow out from between my teeth well into the 2030s. See you all then, I hope.
Until next time…