LAST WEEK’S RESULTS:

Title: “Then Things Got Shady”
Prompt: This week’s contest answer is a famous TV show.
Answer: CHEERS, found by 321 solvers, 270 of which were solo solves

Slightly tough for a Week 2, though far from Week 2 Curse Territory! I’ll count that as a win…

13×13 grid, with but one overt hint; at the Omega-Across (55-A) we had the clue:

[Company identified with a six-color bird] = NBC

We’re looking for a TV show, so that’s got a 95% chance of being important (and it was!). NBC chose the peacock logo in the 1950s to illustrate its new color technology with that polychromatic bird. And, importantly for our meta, the bird’s feather colors in the logo are from left to right, YELLOW-ORANGE-RED-PURPLE-BLUE-GREEN. Now what?

Well, many of the Across entries in the grid just happen to conspicuously be those colors:

13-A: ELMO — red
16-A: ROBIN’S EGG — blue
22-A: EGGPLANT — purple
28-A: HOME DEPOT LOGO — orange. Ask me how long it took me to find something orange that starts with H. A looong time.
36-A: SNOW PEAS — green
54-A: CORN — yellow

Now what? The first letters of these spell EREHSC which isn’t much. But put them in logo-color order and you get:

CORN
HOME DEPOT LOGO
ELMO
EGGPLANT
ROBIN’S EGG
SNOW PEAS

That gives you contest answer CHEERS, found by 321 solvers.

I wanted to put all the theme entries on the Acrosses as an extra lock for the solver, but some solvers interpreted OPEN SPACE as the white open space between the colors on the NBC logo. Not my intention at all, but it didn’t throw anyone off the trail so all good. I originally had one asymmetry of theme entries in the grid (OPEN SPACE not being theme) but then I moved CORN down a row so there was a second one so solvers (hopefully) didn’t think there was supposed to be theme entry symmetry.

Jeff G. says:

Hey Matt, the week 2 curse has finally been lifted for me! I was pulling my hair out trying to figure out what color applies to Open Space. Elmo and Corn were hiding on me, and it didn’t hit me until this morning to put them in peacock order.

Brian Kell did something clever at 30,000 feet:

I did this puzzle on a trans-Atlantic flight with no wi-fi, so I had to pull up a 30 Rock episode to see what the NBC logo looked like 🙂

And finally, DIS quips:

Everybody knows the name, but the logo they might have to google.

On to Week 3!

THIS WEEK’S INSTRUCTIONS:

Good luck!

–Matt