Photo Illustration by Elizabeth Brockway/The Daily Beast/Peacock
I was raised on Game Show Network—specifically during that period when the network wasn’t sure if it wanted to reboot old shows or just show reruns of the beloved programs of yesteryear.
I spent my summers invested in the latter. Match Game and What’s My Line? were my favorites because they came preloaded with a cast of characters: big personalities like Brett Somers and Charles Nelson Reilly. I used to think about how fun it would be to grow up in the ’70s and riff with Brett over our matching answers.
No attempts at rebooting these classics could recreate the magic of those old series, and then soon after, around the turn of the millennium, the literal game shifted entirely.