Let’s not fool ourselves. This wasn’t the biggest story in media yesterday by a long shot. But I do know who many of my readers are and to them it was a big deal. And to me, it threw me enough of a curveball to remind me of how much things have changed, so anything that hints of some sort of harkening to better times is always welcomed.
VULTURE’s Josef Adalian, one of our kindred spirit in media who actually knows a thing or two about the game show genre, eagerly shared this breaking news with his pop culture-savvy readers:
ABC has some blanking good news for fans of classic game shows — and of comedy icons who hail from Canada. The network is once again reviving the star-studded, big-money 1970s comedy panel show Match Game, and it snagged Only Murders in the Building star Martin Short to serve as host, Vulture has learned. The latest iteration of the series is expected to begin production in Montreal in the near future for a potential premiere on ABC as soon as this summer.
Well, those two events aren’t quite as interconnected as Adalian might be indicating. Montreal had been chosen for the cost savings over both New York and Los Angeles (tariffs don’t directly impact productions) and I believe a standing set from a 2012 version which Fremantle produced for that market, which the likes of Norm Macdonald ,Sarah Silverman and even Carolina Rhea populated, may still be in storage. And Short was a last-minute replacement to boot. DEADLINE’s Peter White was one of the few to report what had been conveyed to me a couple of weeks earlier that another current star of a streaming original was supposed to have the gig:
Deadline understands that Sarah Jessica Parker had been in talks to be involved in the reboot of the show but a deal wasn’t closed.
There was a time not all that long ago when such news and updates would have been fed to be practically intravenously. In fact, when the show was last resussitated in 2016 I had almost daily updates on who was going to get the coveted gig. Sony had a vested interest in the news as we were mounting our own reboot of a classic celebrity format, THE $100,000 PYRAMID, as part of ABC’s ambitious turning over of three hours of prime time to what they called SUNDAY FUN AND GAMES, and MATCH GAME was going to be our lead-out. We were eventually stunned by the out-of-the-box choice of Alec Baldwin to take the iconic skinny microphone made famous in the OG version by OG host Gene Rayburn, but when we heard that Fremantle was supposedly coughing up $300,000 an episode for a guy who had more recently been doing comedy for a host of NBC series, we were gratified. Both because we knew he was a talent with a current following, and because we were paying our own host, Michael Strahan, significantly less.
These days, my sources have dwindled, I have no direct involvement whatsoever, and the one person who did know was waaay too busy with asynchronous lesson plans and free lunches to have passed anything along. So most humble apologies to anyone I may have misled.
I will go on record and say all things considered I’m genuinely intrigued by the choice of Short and I do have faith in the effort. VARIETY’s Michael Schneider reminded how the track record of both show and personality merited this order:
The format, which first premiered in 1962 (hosted by Gene Rayburn), has been revived several times in the decades since then. ABC also ran the previous version of “Match Game,” which was hosted by Alec Baldwin. That edition debuted in 2016, and ran for five seasons (and approximately 69 episodes) before being canceled in 2022. Short and Alycia Rossiter will serve as as executive producers on the new edition. Short, of course, stars on Hulu’s “Only Murders in the Building,” which often gets a secondary broadcast run on ABC. As a host, Short helmed a daytime talk show in 1999, and more recently has served as a guest host multiple times on ABC’s “Jimmy Kimmel Live!”
One suspects with Short you’re likely to get other folks who work with him, and as we’ve previously mused, plenty of them are fellow legends. And there is a sort of delicious irony that now it is Short who gets to play game show host after a history of fawning over a more established one. Ironically, tonight he’s embarking on his “final spin” as the much-delayed season of CELEBRITY WHEEL OF FORTUNE hits the same ABC primetime schedule that MATCH GAME will later occupy. Guess somebody had to fill the void.
And in yet another example of irony, Short will be making his hosting debut at age 75, just short of Sajak’s age when he shot those shows. And two years older than Gene Rayburn was when ABC passed on him hosting yet another revival of the show he made famous and ruled 70s daytime–and prime access on ABC-owned stations. Reportedly, when ENTERTAINMENT TONIGHT reported how old he was on his birthday, the news rattled ABC daytime management enough for them to drop him out of consideration. They instead gave the nod to the significantly younger Bert Convy. Tragically, Convy was stricken with brain cancer shortly after his pilot episodes were shot and he never actually hosted an air episode of the series (he passed away around the same time the revival met its own demise).
So I guess this is all a reminder that just when you consider something or someone to be too old or failed for consideration, someone somewhere eventually decides that talent and ratings history should actually decide what and why something gets produced, and nothing isn’t really gone until it’s actually gone.
Considering how things have been going lately, that’s perhaps the best _______ing news I’ve gotten of late.
Until next time…