Thursday, February 8, 2018

On The Air: Beat The Clock (2018)

An old favorite is back, this time geared for families.

Beat The Clock is the latest Goodson-Todman classic resurrected by Fremantle Media, which is preparing one of their own properties, American Idol, to relaunch on ABC next month. Paul Costabile is the new host of Clock, which launched on Universal Kids (formerly Sprout) on Tuesday. Currently, it airs weeknights at 7:30 pm (ET), but don't rely on the program guide on your cable system, as it seems UK snuck Clock onto the schedule at the last minute.

It's the same game your parents, and likely also your grandparents, will remember dating back nearly 70 years, and it's the first reincarnation of the franchise in 15 years (last aired on Pax, now Ion, in 2002-3). What drew NBC-Universal-Comcast's attention? Well, they tried a variant on the franchise a few years back with Minute To Win It, which lasted a couple of years before being shipped off to GSN. The diff between this Clock and its forebears is that now children get to play the game. That tells us UK is positing itself to challenge Disney Channel and Nickelodeon for ratings supremacy. (Cartoon Network? Fuhgeddaboutit!).

Here's a teaser.



Eat your heart out, Nickelodeon!

Rating: A.

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