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As cinematographer Neil Oseman points out in his blog on lighting the fictional game show “The Knowledge”, quiz show sets through the ages are a handy signifier for the wandering time traveller trying to figure out what decade they’ve landed in.
One of the factors behind these trends, predictably, is technology.
Stephen Bryce is a production designer who has worked on numerous game shows and more, and is responsible for the futuristic sets you can see in The Family Brain Games, Viral Tap, and the companion show The Apprentice: You’re Fired. He explained to us that many of the tools for making game show sets more dramatic and futuristic have simply become much cheaper and easier to use.
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“Years ago, a lit edge used to need neon lights, glass tubes, and it was really expensive,” Bryce says. “Now it’s much, much cheaper. We have LED tape lights that are much cheaper and easier to install. The basically advances in technology make these options much more readily available.”
There are still exceptions to the rule – shows like Richard Osman’s House of Games, Taskmaster, or the Child Genius series that Bryce himself has worked on take on a different aesthetic entirely. But Bryce points out there is a common look among what he calls the “Saturday Night Shiny Floor” shows.
Games Without Final Frontiers
The reasons behind the space-age game show aesthetic go beyond cheaper funky lighting. There has, over the decades, been a great deal of osmosis between the genres in terms of talent, influences and ideas. Richard D James is a well-known production designer known primarily for his work on the sets of Battlestar Galactica, Star Trek: The Next Generation and Star Trek: Voyager, but he cut his teeth designing sets for game shows like Let’s Make a Deal, The Choice is Yours, and Split Second.
