Amazon: A Game Show Lover's Gold Mine

Text by: Cyndi Seidelman

With many more people deciding to cut the proverbial cords and moving to services such as Netflix and Hulu for their visual entertainment needs, game shows have been severely under-represented over the services in the past few years. Only Hulu had certain game shows such as classic episodes of Hollywood Squares, Celebrity Bowling and You Bet Your Life, but little else. Netflix partnered up with GSN and got some of their originals like Skin Wars, The Chase and *shudder* Steampunk'd, and hardly anything else. So, where would we go to get our classic fix that isn't YouTube? 

Well, leave it to Buzzr and Fremantle to give us the answer.  Over the course of the past year, Fremantle Media has slowly been pushing more and more of their classic game show properties onto more and more digital outlets. The first one that we heard about was Nosey, which had classic episodes of Match Game, Press Your Luck among others.  While not many people can get Nosey, it was seen as a trial run to see if it was viable. After Nosey, shows started to pop up on Amazon. It is there that they started to gain more traction.

Originally, the shows that popped up first were the same ones that were on the Nosey app. Unlike Nosey, a lot more people get Amazon and started watching more and more of the classic shows, leading up to an official partnership between Amazon and Buzzr. Over the course of the last few months, the number of shows has grown to fifteen different shows with 20 episode each with certain exceptions.  The shows on Amazon Prime Video are Match Game '75 (has 40 episodes over 2 "seasons") and '78, Beat The Clock (Hall), Tattletales, Family Feud (Dawson, Combs and Anderson), Blockbusters (Cullen), Body Language, Password Plus, Super Password (has 40 episodes over 2 "seasons"), Card Sharks (Perry & Eubanks), What's My Line (Daly and has 40 episodes over 2 "seasons"), I've Got A Secret (Moore), Child's Play, Double Dare (Trebek), Hole In The Wall and just added on January 30th, Supermarket Sweep from the PAX revival. The only show that was on Nosey that isn't currently on Amazon Prime is To Tell The Truth, which I hope does come on Amazon Prime soon enough.

The success of Buzzr's efforts will hopefully lead the charge to more classic game shows to come on services like Amazon Prime. One show that has come on board is Celebrity Bowling with three batches of shows. These episodes loog great and some haven't been seen since the original run when it went off in 1977 and You Bet Your Life made its way on here as well. I am hoping this leads to more big companies like Sony to use Crackle for their own shows that they have. It would be great to see batches of classic Wheel Of Fortune, Jeopardy and Pyramid that are just sitting in moth balls collecting dust. People love to bingewatch stuff and game shows are the perfect bingewatch fuel that have everything in emotion, excitement and playalong factor that makes watching stuff like this great.  Here's hoping to more Buzzr classics coming to Amazon in the future! Secretly, I'm hoping Shop 'Til You Drop comes to Buzzr so we can get that on Amazon Prime in the future!