#100: Big Saturday Night
It's so bad, we had to make it our 100th Induction!

GSN: (June-July 2009)

I don't know what happened to GSN in 2009. I thought they were doing well with their daily cut-ins with GSN Live, GSN Radio was doing really well and despite a terrible host, Catch 21 was doing well too. But then you start in May with one big disaster in The 2009 Game Show Awards. It was a disaster in more ways than one. The winners were garbage and the games that they played featured some of the dumbest contestants this network had to offer. But then just when you thought you thought The Game Show Awards was going to be the worst thing to show up on GSN that year, you then see a commercial with this annoying prat yelling at a couple watching TV, hyping up something called Big Saturday Night. When the commercial aired, it promised us two shows in The Money List and 20Q, both good shows. But what Big Saturday Night really was is a bunch of cut-ins stretching 2 60 minute shows into 2 90 minute shows. The Cut-ins would turn out to be some of the worst produced television in the medium's history. Not only that, it was these cut-ins and inanity that actually gave me another push to create this site. So now we get to relive the pain that GSN thrusted upon us.

There were three hosts for this show, so let's break them down. The main host was Keegan Michael Key. I don't know why, but his look reminds me of Howie Mandel. However, he lacked the charm, personality or the OCD, which gave us the new way of greeting contestants by fist-bumping them. It should be noted that he was a cast member from Mad TV, so you know just how well those careers have taken off after that show. I don't know what to say about Keegan except for the fact that he is one of the more annoying bastages to host a TV show since Dolly had her variety show back in 1987. He's an ok question reader, but to be blunt, he just grates on me.

Now, what would any live cut-in show in primetime be on GSN without some eye-candy and they picked some nice eye candy with Charissa Thompson. She was alright in her role, but nothing too spectacular. Which is kind of sad to say that she was the best one out of the three. When I first saw her, it felt like she was Generic Blonde Hostess #72531. And in the end, it seemed like it was an apt conclusion.

Finally, we see the third host in Ross Mathews aka Ross the Intern from The Tonight Show with Jay Leno. I don't know what to say about this one, but here it goes. This is the worst host that GSN has ever put on the air. Yes, worse than Wendy Williams, Dylan Lane, and Burt Luddin combined. Not only that, he's one of the biggest walking gay stereotypes out there today. He's got the voice, the sashay, and the mannerisms that make me somewhat embarrassed for my gay friends out there. Yes, I know I'm being nice to him here, so I'll just let my Buzzerblog post from 2009 tell you the rest about how I feel about Ross Mathews on this show.

Ross Mathews aka Ross the Intern is by far the WORST host for anything on GSN. We get it, You're gay. We don't' care as long as you host well. And to be honest, you are worse than Patrick Wayne. You put your annoying self over like nobody's business, which is the absolute worst thing a host can do, When you tried the game with Tom Green, the acting game, you didn't even know what the hell to do, yet you were prepped on this before the show started and not 1 minute before the game started. You are absolutely pathetic and don't deserve to be on TV. Also, don't get me started on that horrific attempt at Weekend Update for Game Shows, especially with your drooling over reading the story about Adam Lambert coming out of the closet and wanting him to make you his twinky bottom bitch. Not only that, the plugs that you gave are worse for Oodles and that Seaworld sketch were horrifically done. May you never grace any stage again, not even a strip club stage, you untalented bozo.

Maybe it's a good thing that my writing improved before I started doing the site. Ok, now that we have that out of the way, let's dive head first into the rest of the crap that was Big Saturday Night.

 Big Saturday Night mainly featured two things: sketches and games. I'm going to start off with games, because those are easier to do. They had a good variety of games. Some ranged from the simple and effective ones, like when Ross went to Seaworld and then asked some audience members about the footage. Getting it right won $1,000. Nothing bad about that, except for Ross's reading of the questions. I swear, he's getting his very own induction in the future. Here and his stuff on 1 Vs. 100 made me want to go to an actual mob and tell them that Italians are pathetic.

To some overly done ones, like this letter game called "What's in a Word?", where contestants have to make new words out of 3 other words, in this case Tuscan, Style and Chicken and the most letters used in properly spelled words wins $5,000. It's not a bad game, but boy did it bring some stupidity. BTW, Nice spelling of the word suck, David. But I do agree, this show really does scuk.

To this horrendous version of the Snapback event from American Gladiators called Bill Busters. Well, they did a ton of variants of Bill Busters, sometimes with Bingo, but the theory is the same. The contestants here had to go to a wall, and bring back a bill to their bucket. The catch is that both are tied to a singular bungee cord, so they had to drag their opponents sometimes. Yeah, it wasn't very pleasant to watch. It also didn't help that Keegan and Ross were very horrible at being hosts and didn't care sometimes, or in the case of Ross; faking it more than flopping soccer players.

If you thought the games were painful, then what drove this show to the grave faster than anything was the unfunny sketches that they did. There were three segments that caused this show to nosedive more than anything. The biggest one was "Before They Were Hosts." These featured game show hosts before they were on shows, and these were a gigantic flop and were hated by pretty much anybody and everybody just for two major reasons. One, they weren't funny at all. And two, the acting was worse than in a Disney Sitcom.

Sometimes they would interview a game show figure, calling it Behind the Game Show. They would rip-off Behind The Music and do it on a specific character, such as the whammy. Just like Before they were hosts, this was another slap in the face when it came to game show fans. Think about it, you're trashing game shows on a game show on a game show channel being watched by game show fans. Surely, you'd want to keep them happy and not lose the 300,000-400,000 viewers who wanted to see this program. But then again, I forgot. They got the same writers that were on MadTV, and they don't know funny from their ass or a hole in the ground.

Speaking of ripping off SNL, I guess they hired Keegan because he could do a Barack Obama impersonation. These were really terrible because not only was Keegan unfunny about it, it hardly sounded like Obama. I mean, at least when Will Ferrell did George W Bush, he sounded like Bush. But then again, Keegan is from MadTV, and they weren't really known for great parodies of anything, just stupid pathetic sketches involving partially retarded people and other sketches that made you want to punch a hole through your TV. It made me yearn for George W. Bush to be back in the White House so we could get a good impersonation of a commander in chief.

The final and biggest waste of time was when they did Wide World of Games. This was a Weekend Update rip-off, where they did Weekend Update, but with game and reality show news, so they were essentially ripping off We Love To Interrupt on that front, but blended it with humor that comes off as forced instead of natural as WLTI does. Then you have Ross Mathews there to do something stupid. Which just makes you want to stop watching.

And apparently, that's what GSN figured out and shrank Big Saturday Night from cut-ins on The Money List and 20Q to it's own 30 minute show. I admit, this format was a bit better, but you still had all the things that made the show suck: Ross, the sketches, Ross, Keegan, Ross, blatant oodle plugging, Ross, painful games, oh and did I mention that I want to kill Ross Mathews?

And that's what I'd like to do with this. Kill everything. Keegan was horrible, Charissa was just eye-candy, The sketches were horrible, terrible, no good, very bad and unfunny, the games were a mixed bag and woe unto you if you had to deal with Ross in your game. And let's see....Oh yeah, Ross Mathews and his annoying, douchebaggy, fake-ass acting, stereotypical gay ass fucking horrible hosting shit self who should have been left being a cage dancer at some godforsaken go-go club in downtown San Francisco, hopefully not making anything and living on the street, you un-talented waste of molecular tissue!

There's induction 100 for you. May we never have to deal with anything as bad as Ross Mathews on a game show ever again. I dread for when I have to induct him, but thankfully it's the last induction of 2011. I'm going to enjoy my holiday and get drunk on new years. God knows I need it after this one.

 

Have any questions about the site? Submit them to us via our Facebook page, our Twitter, and through e-mail. We'll be sure to answer them to the very best of our ability.

(c) 2009-2017 - A CQS Production.


(GSG is a JRW Creations website)

Help GSG pay some bills!