"The Match Game" consistently won its time slot from 1963 to 1966 and again from April 1967 to July 1968, with its ratings allowing it to finish third among all network daytime TV game shows for the 1963–64 and 1967–68 seasons (by the latter season, NBC was the dominant network in the game show genre; ABC wasn't as successful and CBS had mostly dropped out of the genre). NBC also occasionally used special episodes of the series as a gap-filling program in prime time if one of its movies had an irregular time slot. Although the series still did well in the ratings (despite the popularity of ABC's horror-themed soap opera "Dark Shadows"), it was canceled in 1969 along with other game shows in a major daytime programming overhaul, being replaced by "Letters to Laugh-In" which, although a spin-off of the popular primetime series "Rowan & Martin's Laugh-In", ended in just three months, on December 26.