Something that stuck out to me a lot when watching the video on Jeopardy! in week six was that the process of these productions can be streamlined to almost a point of automation. The director’s assistant knew what the director wanted often before they vocalised it. While on the one hand, doing over eight-thousand episodes would probably make one fairly proficient at that process and would be easier to learn another person’s style and ways of doing things, I also think it demonstrated that proficiency in the form of repetitive reiterations of a program is probably one of the best ways for things to be streamlined, and the more you communicate with your crew the more likely you are to be able to prepare for something going wrong because you’ll have a better understanding of usual go-to’s, or also general conventions of that genre of show or even specifically of the show itself, like what is mentioned in the week six reading by Su Holmes, who discusses game show formulas and how moving away from them is often “precisely it’s negotiation of difference” (Holmes, 2008) between shows.

Holmes also talks about the distinction between game shows and quiz shows, and the differences between them, and whether their classification should be lumped into the same category or not. Across the three pieces we made for assignment two, one was a game show and two were quiz shows. I hadn’t really considered this classification before now, as game shows maybe biggest property of difference in my viewing experience was whether they were a serious game show (i.e. people won something of importance or value), verse a entertainment game show, which I view as the types of programs where the participation is pretty much the award in itself, and doesn’t actually get you anything (and there is less cultural significance for “winning” it). I guess if I had a takeaway from that reading and my experiences afterwards, it would just be that I have a larger appreciation for the differences between these formats and how they work, as functionally they operate in a fairly different manner behind the scenes, comparative to a quiz show, which has different formulas and conventions to make them engaging, such as more refined rules, EVS clips and history behind them.

References:

Holmes, S 2008, The Quiz Show, Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh. Available from: ProQuest Ebook Central. [24 April 2023].