Return of the Chuck

The pdf schedules that GSN sends out are notoriously unreliable, especially for weeks well into the future. By the time those distant weeks roll around, who knows what the network will have done with the lineup?

So the pdf schedule in this blog's sidebar for the week of February 25 should be taken with a cubic yard of salt. But making the wild assumption that the schedule is accurate, Chuck Woolery's Lingo will return to the lineup.

It's hard to believe that this little word game became GSN's longest-lived original, running through seven seasons from its start in 2002. The network invested very little in the show at first, even taping the first twenty painfully cheap episodes on the Dutch version's set to save a few bucks.

But the game caught on, and Chuck hosted the show until his sixth and final season in 2007. Reruns continued forever, and the network even tried a new batch of episodes with Bill Engvall and some tweaks to the gameplay. But Chuck's version finally vanished from GSN a few months ago. Well, as Mr. Schwarzenegger once said, I'll be back. Or Chuck will be back. With Shandi Finnessey in reruns of the fifth season.