So what killed the game show? Nothing. Yes, there are those who believe that the game show died in the mid 1980's only to be resurrected in recent years and this is true. However, if the game show made a brief comeback and then died again one could say that the game show was killed and then came back in a nostalgia format for a brief while then the argument could be made that game shows were indeed a dead television genre. They aren't. They simply fell out of vogue for a decade and then came back. Game shows…whether it be WHO WANT TO BE A MILLIONAIRE or AMERICAN IDOL or DANCING WITH THE STARS (yes, I consider those later two programs to be a spin on games shows) the fact remains that game shows will always be super popular. So why did they disappear for a short period of time? Circa 1985, there were a ton of game shows such as SUPER PASSWORD, SCRABBLE, and reworks of NAME THAT TUNE and others that were all riding the popularity that JEOPARDY and WHEEL OF FORTUNE had ushered in. So why did they die off in the late 1980's? Talk shows. Yes, talk shows had been popular for decades and they always sort of bordered on the sleazy it wasn't until the late 1980's that talk shows really started to revel in utter sleaze. These shows (many of which were "works' that unethically paraded phony guests who were really actors) paraded a ton of sleazy circus sideshow freaks that drew in a voyeuristic audience that loved this programming….cheap programming that could be much easier to produce as opposed to game shows. So, the volume of talk shows was increased and the number of game shows was decreased. Of course, many game shows had also become quite dull after 40 years of a lack of a compelling new format so their audiences were drifting en mass. For a while, sleazy talk shows became hugely popular although the popularity would remain short lived….more to come.