For as long as televisions have been a common appliance in American homes, there have been game shows. These shows reward people for their knowledge of trivia, keen intellect, dumb luck or a combination of the three. They are often silly, frivolous and chock full of advertisements, but Americans have an insatiable appetite for them nevertheless.
The basic formula for game shows is simple and reliable. Have your contestants consist of average Joes and Janes, people to whom the viewers can relate. Put a lot of money on the line which can be won with a correct answer or a stroke of good luck. If the contestants win, show them being overcome with joy so the people at home can share in their success. Lastly, insert product endorsements whenever possible and precede every suspenseful event with a commercial break. The challenge of game show producers, then, is to come up with shows that take this same concept and spin it in a new way. There have been literally hundreds of game shows, but only a handful deserve mention in this column.
First off, there is the granddaddy of game shows -- "The Price is Right." Anyone who has ever missed a day of school sick or had a lazy summer morning and flipped through daytime programming has encountered this show. You watch it because there's nothing better on, but then you start checking for other shows during commercials and wind up missing the showcase ending every single time. Although the old, lovable Bob Barker has been replaced with the chubby, lovable Drew Carey as the host of the show, it remains otherwise unchanged from the show we watched when we were kids. The most memorable part of this show to me is not the excitement and euphoria that result from correctly guessing the price of Tide laundry detergent but the bidding the contestants must do before they get called up on stage.
For those of you not familiar with this part of the show, contestants sequentially guess the retail price of a luxury item on stage. The bidder who guessed closest to the price without guessing a price that exceeds the actual amount wins. This allows for the biggest cock block in game show history -- bidding $1 more than the person who bid just before you. Nothing ruins someone's fun more than bidding $751 right after he or she bid $750. There have even been instances when this happened three times in a row, meaning each bid was $1 greater than the last and only the last bidder had any legitimate chance of winning.
Then there's the game show that made the title of this column one of the most recognizable phrases in the country -- "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?" The show features increasingly difficult questions and a handful of lifelines to bail out the contestant when he's stumped. The show's format has been imitated in several new shows since then, and its clever title has been extended to a handful of crappy dating shows like "Who Wants to Marry My Dad?"
Successful shows like these have been important components of popular culture. They draw millions of viewers and are often the topic of water cooler conversation the next work day. Contestants become hometown celebrities, and people who messed up the easy opportunities are laughed at on YouTube. Also, particularly popular game shows are usually recreated in a computer or board game. These games often seem senseless. Take the "Deal or No Deal" computer game, for example. What's the point of a game of pure luck that's played without real money? Why would you ever make a deal when you could win more? "Gosh, I'd like to go for the fake million that's still on the board, but I think I'll settle for the fake $150k so I can open up a fake coffee store and pay off my fake credit card debt." Why do people enjoy that?
New shows are still being made all the time; the good ones stick and the bad ones get canceled after a few episodes.
We'll see dozens more wacky concepts that find success and popularity in our lifetimes. In the meantime, the current shows will continue to provide TV viewers with entertainment and a few lucky contestants with big paydays. Maybe if you're lucky, you yourself will be one of these contestants one day, and we can all have a good laugh watching you mess it up on YouTube.
Daniel's column runs biweekly Tuesdays. He can be reached at mcnally@cavalierdaily.com.
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