Pretty much every die-hard game show fan knows about Black Friday, 1980 (which I will get to in a future blog entry), but I'm here to talk about a somewhat lesser-known Black Friday that also involved NBC (surprise, surprise).
The date is Friday, September 26, 1969. Man had landed on the moon two months prior, we were still a few months away from a big yellow bird terrorizing children's television, and "The Brady Bunch" premiered on ABC, but we're here to talk about NBC.
On this day on the National Broadcasting Company, four game shows ended their runs, many of which were very popular shows for the network: "Personality" (hosted by Larry Blyden), "Eye Guess" (hosted by Bill Cullen), "You Don't Say" (hosted by Tom Kennedy), and the original "Match Game" (hosted by Gene Rayburn). Three of their replacements ("Name Droppers" for "Eye Guess", "Bright Promise" for "You Don't Say", and "Letters to Laugh-in" for "The Match Game") didn't last as long as the shows they replaced, while Personality's replacement, the original "Sale of the Century", lasted for nearly four years, twice as long as "Personality".
Ironically, two of the replacements for the replacement shows lasted longer than the replacements. (Confused? So am I) Letters to Laugh-In's replacement, "The Who, What, or Where Game," lasted for four years, while the replacement for "Name Droppers", the "Another World" spin-off "Somerset", lasted for over six years).
It was moves like these that ultimately cost NBC the top spot in daytime.
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