TVSquad

Chuck Woolery is coming back to television. While he will be hosting a game show, this time around it has nothing to do with love or its connections. Woolery is set to host The Meow Mix Game Show on GSN. Meow Mix is said to be a cat-centric competition in which cats and their owners compete for up to $1 million for themselves and $100,000 for their favorite feline charity.

The show itself is supposed to "put a twist" on classic game shows like Jeopardy and ... The Newlywed Game. I'm sorry, but The Newlywed Game? What in the hell are we dealing with here? The person who dreamed this up must have been chasing the dragon when they thought it was a good idea to compare their cat show to a program in which seemingly every question involved the phrase, "making whoopie."

Americans are utterly obsessed with celebrities ... particularly their lives away from the limelight. Numerous television "news" programs and magazines highlight stars doing normal things that many of us would do on a daily basis. So, it was only logical that reality series have been built around some of these personalities to highlight their time away from the camera.

Yet it didn't work out as was intended. Rather than showing that these personalities were normal people, they showed the viewers how messed up they, and their families, really were. In some of the earlier Celebreality programs, they even showed unknown weaknesses that fans never knew existed. Despite all of this, viewers have been tuning into these shows each and every week to watch ... just like they would if video of different train wrecks were aired each week.

This fan base has given many of these stars a second, third, or fourth chance at success -- even if their boat sailed a long time ago. Such is the case during the Reality Revolution, where even the most famous can receive fifteen more minutes of fame.

I've been wondering if this show was even still in production. Every time I turn it on it seems to be an episode that I've already seen, or even if I haven't seen it, it's an episode from a year or two ago. But now GSN has announced that the Chuck Woolery-hosted spelling game show will be back for a sixth season. Shandi Finnessey will be back as his co-host, typing away at the computer and starting each game, and there will be four special episodes where online champions face off against TV champions.

OK, so this game isn't exactly Jeopardy. It might not even be Wheel Of Fortune, but I enjoy it. And as I've said here before, I like it when Shandi says "Lingo balls."

The new season starts on April 2.

There's always been something about Chuck Woolery that I've liked. He wasn't like the other classic game show hosts that I used to watch in the seventies and eighties; instead of being all about the hair, teeth and deep voice, Chuck was always a relaxed and easy-going presence that seemed like he actually cared about whether the contestants on his shows won or not. So, this actually makes him a perfect guy to sell pretty much anything on TV. I just didn't think he'd sell this:

Lately I've been seeing Chuck in ads that sell real estate in various locales: one in Arkansas and one in New Mexico. The commercials are similar to the ones Erik Estrada does. You know the sales pitch: "Come to Jerkwater Springs! The weather here is great! It's growing by leaps and bounds! And you can buy a lot for only fifty grand!" Then the celebrity offers a free weekend for two in order to entice you to come down and hear the pitch in person. It's all very cheesy, and borderline suspicious.