GSN, after adding millions of new viewers and enjoying its most-watched year in 2014, said it greenlit two more original series and has ordered three new pilots, including an unnamed spinoff of the Rebecca Romijn-hosted bodypainting competition series Skin Wars.
At an upfront breakfast event at the Sony Building in midtown Manhattan, network programming chief Amy Introcaso-Davis said the game-show based outlet's programming had turned in a "younger, cooler, hipper direction," helped by shows like Skin Wars, which she said set record marks as a new series last year in the network's key audience demographics. GSN has finished production on a second season of the show, which also features RuPaul Charles. Five of the network's roster of seven original series are returning in 2015, officials said.
Steampunk'd, one of the two new series GSN has ordered for 2015, is a competition series for artists and designers who work in the Steampunk genre, which blends science fiction and fantasy and technology into art. The other new show on order is Lie Detectors, a game show hosted by Australian comedian Rove McManus in which three comedians tell a story and the audience has to guess which one of the three is telling the truth. Network officials had no more information to provide in terms of when the shows would launch or how many episodes were ordered.
GSN in January said it was ordering a re-take on the old game show Chain Reaction, in which teams of contestants compete to complete chains of words. And at the upfront, the network said it ordered a 65-episode second season of game show Idiotest, hosted by Ben Gleib (pictured), who acted as emcee at the upfront event before invited press, advertisers and media buyers.
The network, co-owned by Sony and DirecTV, said it has two other shows developing a pilot besides the untitled Skin Wars spinoff (which will invite artists who excel in other media to learn to "use the human body as a canvas for the first time"). One is Hellevator, a game show that asks three friends to ride a scary elevator to the basement of a warehouse and compete in challenges there. Jason Blum (Paranormal Activity) is an executive producer. The other is Winsanity, a game show about guessing the order in which seven surprising facts should be ranked. Hellevator and Winsanity were previously announced as being in development.
GSN also ordered 50 three-minute episodes of a British interstitial series, Man Vs. Fly, in which a human does battle with a housefly in a sealed room.
GSN's development slate also includes Window Warriors, a competition show about retail-window designers.
