Aw, I was going to post a full thread detailing everything. I'll just copy and paste what I had here. Spoilers for tonight's episode technically, and *long* warning.
Hi, I know I'm not the recapper for Wheel, but I loved
acwof 's seasonal recaps. This seriously has been a season that will go down in the books. Let's talk about it!
After Season 37 was cut short due to complications with coronavirus, and an extended break, Wheel came back. Mike richards took the role of Executive Producer after Harry Friedman retired. The week before the season premiere, we caught
of a new socially-distant set. The podium was made wider for Pat and the three contestants to stay six feet apart, the distance between flippers was increased from 7 to 11 pegs, and contestants spun with
a bicycle handlebar grip, with Pat dubbing the apparatus as "The White Thing," and the staff and some of the internet referring to it as a "Wheel Condom".
On September 9th,
Viacom CBS Press Express also teased something coming soon.
Although this ended up being Vanna wearing the same dress twice,
which we technically debunked, I've never seen something so elaborate been hinted at in my few years on this board, which showed that Mike Richards or some publicist at least was willing to inject some new life into the show.
We started out with Teachers' Week, as always, and saw that the gameplay changes from last season (Triple Toss-Up, 1/2 Car's retirement, prize minimum now at $7,000, intro and Final Spin graphics) stayed. In fact, with the exception of one week thanks to Margaritaville, there were no gameplay changes.
The last surprise of the new season came up on the second show of the week, where all the Toss-Ups were sponsored by T-Mobile. There was zero press release talking about why, but I conjectured at the time that it had to deal with "T-Mobile Tuesdays", a loyalty rewards program that's kind of self explanitory (they give stuff out on that day). I'll discuss this more later.
Let's take a quick look at the stats this season. Of course, thank you for the people at Andy Nguyen's blog for keeping running weekly totals (
andynwof.wordpress.com/author/andynwof/)
First off, we gave away a whopping eight-figure amount of cash and prizes: $11,099,583! This is the highest season total since Season 32, and that had the last million dollar win. It certainly helped that we had 76 Bonus Round wins against 119 losses, batting .390. The last time we did better was in Season 31.
Excluding weeks with modifications to the maingame (I know, the home, going to get to that in a little bit), the highest we reached in a single week was just three weeks ago, at Margaritaville Family Vacation. During the week of May 17th,
Wheel gave away $426,587 in cash, trips, and cars! Our worst week was toward the beginning of the season, during the first America's Game, where on the week of November 9, we didn't even break 200 grand - $192,957.
Surprisingly, things have been really quiet with the Million Dollar Wedge; we only had 5 million dollar bonus rounds.
Blue ended up winning the most games, with a nice 69 wins under their belt.
Red was just a win away with 68, while
Yellow was a distant third with 58 wins.
AC liked to talk about the good, the bad, and the ugly, but I'd rather talk about the weird than the ugly.
Let's start with the good first though.
First off, we actually got a complete 195 episode season with no days off! Considering that last season got cut short, I have to applaud the crew for doing everything in a safe manner, with only
one incident that didn't appear to spread to everyone else. I'd like to congratulate the crew on making sure everything went smoothly and safely this season.
But now onto the gameplay, we had a whooping
FIVE $100,000 winners this season! We had
Patrick McIntosh check out MY FAVORITE HANGOUT,
Calais Harvey take a BOWL OF APPLES,
Katie Parker TAKING BOLD ACTION,
Scott Kolbrenner putting on a FLOWING WHITE GOWN, and
Victoria Rice eventually was CHATTING WITH MOM.
Yet, none of these winners ended up being the biggest win of the season. For the past couple of seasons, Latitutde Margaritaville has been offering a home to a lucky Wheel Watcher. This season, for one week only, they decided that the contestants could also win the home as well.
Wheel made one envelope in the bonus round contain a new home. To make it even easier, they added an entire Home wedge to the wheel. Similar to the Million Dollar Wedge, if the wedge was picked up and taken to the bonus round, the show would replace one of the other envelopes with the home, doubling the contestant's chances of winning.
It took literally 2 days for that to happen.
Laura Trammell said I CAUGHT A GLIMPSE at her $375,000 piece of real estate. She became the fourth biggest winner ever with a total of $398,690, and claimed the largest non-million dollar total. That also caused a grand total of $614,487 in cash and prizes given out that week, a new non-million record!
Narratives that some weeks were cursed were shattered, such as Bed & Breakfast week having the first $100,000 win since Season 36, and Margaritaville actually giving away something massive.
Despite being limited to contestants from California, we had quite a few people appear, from past game show contestants to the dude from Manscaped responsible for all the ads to shave your balls.
Just like the previous two seasons, we had another contestant, Doug Tepper, return due to a production error.
Although he isn't telling just to make sure he doesn't breach a legal contract, the working theory is that in his first appearance, the contestant before him asked to call a vowel, but then called the vowel after the buzzer. The staff let it slide, which eventually let her keep $11,000 and a trip. If the staff passed it to Doug, he gets extremely close to a win, and would have only needed to call the S in that round to take the game.
Despite being locked down, we still had a few boardies appear this season! If I missed your name, I'm so sorry; you're supposed to get a gold badge near your name, and the BAV staff only did it to two people this season. Please let me know so I can add your name to the list!
cirkumvent 9/16gscentralbrad 11/2skolbre 3/18muldo 4/14giantoaks 4/30twlas 5/24blastronaut 6/1dintaz 6/1Congrats to the eight of you!
On the Inns of New England set, the week of 5/10, all five bonus round puzzles were won! The last time that happened? June 2015, back in season 32. Because of that hot streak, we also had eight straight episodes of Bonus Round wins from May 10th to May 19th, which is believed to not have happened for over 15 seasons!
Normally, this would be where AC would have moved onto the bad, but we had a couple more events happen. First, ABC picked up
Wheel for primetime. Celebrity Wheel of Fortune was a smash hit. It featured celebrities and a streamlined rule set in order to make winning big easier. It did so well, it's coming back for a season 2 in the fall!
One last bit of good from Wheel: on February 15, a selection of
Wheel of Fortune episodes got added onto Netflix. Although
Jeopardy! had been getting that out for years, this is the first time past episodes of the show were legally available on a streaming service (except for STIRR, but I really haven't heard of that working for anyone).
Now, for the bad, but there isn't really much to say:
Although we got 5 $100k winners, we didn't bat over five hundred. We had six $100,000 losses (
9/23/2020,
12/1/2020,
1/20/2021,
2/17/2021,
2/26/2021, and
4/21/2020).
Around here, we colloquially use the term "skunked" whenever all five bonus round puzzles are lost in a week. This did happen a couple of times, during Shopping Spree and Home for the Holidays, but surprisingly, we haven't been skunked yet in 2021.
Toward the beginning of the season, we did see a few frequent BR patterns (QUART OF ____ MILK, NOTHING TO QUIBBLE ABOUT, I TOOK A QUICK JAUNT), and those did kind of resurface near the end of the season as well (HUGE POD OF WHALES, TAKING THE BOULEVARD, WRAP IT UP IN A JIFFY), but for some reason, from January to April, the puzzles seemed pretty tame; the only memorable "tough" puzzle I recall is LUXURY DUPLEX, but even that was fair, in my opinion.
I don't believe that there was anything particularly ugly about this season (except COVID), so I'll just state a few oddities from this season under the weird category. Some are good, some are bad, but they're kind of minor in the grand scheme of things:
Wheel made some slight cosmetic changes throughout the year.
They zoomed in a little bit and made the puzzleboard and contestant circle a little larger at the start of the season,
they changed the Express graphic slightly (
Here's an example of what it looked like last season, and ignore my ranting in the thread, it's fine, albeit technically a downgrade in my opinion), and after adding it for Celebrity Wheel of Fortune,
they just kept the third border around the wheel.
There appeared to be more sponsorships than normal this season. T-Mobile did sponsor the Toss-Ups of nearly all Tuesdays, to go along with their T-Mobile Tuesday gimmick. On 20 selected Thursdays, to promote their expansion to 5G coverage, they offered a raffle for "5Gs", or $5,000.
Other than that, here is a list of weeks that were sponsored this season, along with the sponsor and what us at home could win:
Week of 9/21: Make Life Sweeter - Cookie Jam - $10,000 raffle, along with a $15,000 promotion in the app.
Weeks of 12/7 and 12/14: Secret Santa - Consumer Cellular - Matching whatever the contestants win to 30 people.
Week of 1/18: Show You the World - Collette - daily raffles for a tour across the world, a total of five tours
Week of 3/8: National Parks - Winnebago - raffle for a Winnebago Solis 59P, valued at $107,821
Week of 4/26: Home Sweet Home - Margaritaville - raffle for a $375,000 home (or $150,000 in cash) and 20 first prizes of Margaritaville Adirondack chairs.
Week of 5/17: Family Vacation - Margaritaville - a trip for 10 to Margaritaville Island Reserve Riviera Cancun and 20 first prizes of Margaritaville Frozen Concoction Makers.
In addition to all this promotion, Prevagen also sponsored a reoccuring segment called "Wheel of Fortune Memories", that takes a look at some noteworty occurrences on the show.
That doesn't include the sponsor for the Mystery Round, closed captioning, etc. That also doesn't include the fact that they are reruning the two Secret Santa weeks in July with new Spin ID's, still sponsored by Consumer Cellular.
As always, there were a couple fringe cases that seemed to be handled in a weird way, like
not awarding the Same Letter bonus independently of a Mystery Gambleor
someone calling a duplicate letter without officially confirming they were riding the Express, when there's now precedent on 5/10's show that they don't hold people to letter calls without doing a valid action, but that's expected to come up every once in a while.
Somehow, Closed Captioning got worse at some time in 2021, at least dating back to
the week of February 22. This isn't just a
Wheel issue; on the
Jeopardy! boards, the closed captioner was
praised at the beginning of 2021, but now is
bashed, even to the point where someone jokingly suggested a Closed Captioning Error thread. It doesn't matter that much for
Wheel, since they show the letters called on the bottom left now, but they've even misspelled contestants' names recently.
On the Netflix upload of 2/4/2020's episode, the copy entirely skips the Prize Puzzle round for some reason.
Ending on a note about gameplay specifically,
4/21/2021's episode had the maingame swept by one contestant, only for them to lose the Bonus Round for $100k. The last maingame sweep was on December 13, 2017, before the Triple Toss-Up.
And that's it from me! Although I kvetched a bit near the end, overall, Mike Richards has done a great job with
Wheel, and honestly, this has probably been the best season I've seen during my tenure on the Buy a Vowel boards.
But what did you think? Did anything stand out this season for you? Any final thoughts of this season? Finally, as we head to Season 39, what are you expecting? Of course, be civil, please don't go overboard with your posts, etc.
With that in mind, I'll see you guys around.
-9821
