Okay, so...the questions I got asked in the past hour were NOT the questions I prepared for. They sent me a list of questions a month ago and I diligently wrote notes about what I wanted to say, and they asked one question out of that whole list. The rest came as a complete surprise.
Sooooooo...since I went to all the trouble of preparing for questions that I didn't get asked...Here you go...
Why don't we celebrate the idea of the common man getting up on stage and winning some cash while his friends & family cheer as much as we used to? Or do we?
I think we do. I think the bigger problem is that a lot of people in the television business sort of view game shows as a nuisance. You want sitcoms with a snappy joke every 2.8 seconds or a two-fisted drama chock full of great performances and gritty realism, and then to a lot of people in the business, geez, a game show. Middle-aged woman who isn’t fit for the cover of a magazine is hollering and laughing because she just won a new living room set to replace all of her old, beat-up secondhand furniture, and answering questions that are too easy, geez a child could answer these, or these questions are too hard and who cares about something that difficult? And the host is some guy who can’t even act. WE celebrate it. A lot of the people in the business don’t.
Why do newer game shows gravitate towards making people embarrass or hurt themselves for fame or prizes? What does this say about us as viewers?
To be fair, the game show that embarrasses contestants is not a new beast by a long shot. In the 1950s, there was a game show called Strike It Rich where poor people came on the show to describe how poor they were. “I’m living in a chicken coop,” “I can’t buy clothes for my children,” and then not only would they answer trivia questions for money, but they had a telephone onstage that home viewers could call to pledge money to the contestant. There was another game, Queen for a Day. They’d bring four women onstage to describe how bad their lives were and the audience would literally vote on who had it the worst, and that woman got a bunch of prizes.
As for why there’s been a resurgence in it, that has a lot to do with the emergence of reality TV. Television is a medium based on looking at your neighbor’s paper and copying his answers, and for some time now, television has been filled with reality shows where the aim seems to be to make the viewers say “I’m glad I’m not these people.” And I think it’s just a matter of the powers-that-be seeing that and trying to give people what they seem to want.
Do we watch shows like Survivor, The Bachelor, etc. to celebrate the winner or to laugh at the losers? Both?
I’d say both. Reality shows meticulously cast their contestants like characters in a film. They want heroes and villains and they want the viewers to decide who they want to root for. It's just like a movie or a play, you want protagonists and antagonists.
Why aren’t classic quiz shows as common as they once were?
Game shows really started to die out during the 1990-91 TV season. A slew of new game shows premiered that year: Quiz Kids Challenge, The Challengers, Trump Card, and revivals of Tic Tac Dough, The Joker’s Wild, Let’s Make a Deal, and To Tell the Truth…and none of them survived that season. They failed for a variety of reasons; Let’s Make a Deal had a new host who didn’t connect with viewers the way that Monty Hall did. Trump Card was just a boring show. The problem is, I think those failures caused crossed wires between TV executives and TV viewers. The message that the executives took from that year was “TV viewers don’t like game shows anymore.” The message we were sending was “You gave us game shows that we didn’t like.” And that miscommunication was the beginning of the end, I think.
Combine that with the fact that the generation that produced the greatest game shows just didn’t get replaced. There hasn’t been a Mark Goodson, Bill Todman, Bob Stewart, Merrill Heatter, or Bob Quigley on the production end. A lot of the game shows that have gone on the air in the past few years are intriguing ideas with not much thought put into the actual content. The worst game shows of the past fifteen years or so are formats that have really good frameworks that look good on paper, but they seem to bank on the idea to carry it.
As far as the people in front of the camera, Bill Cullen, Allen Ludden, Geoff Edwards, and Tom Kennedy and Jack Narz have never been replaced. You do have people like Marc Summers and Tom Bergeron who have shown they can get the job done, but particularly in the case of Marc Summers, not getting all of the opportunities they should get. The greatest game shows had a very elite, special group of people putting them together and presenting them, and they haven’t been duplicated.
Was there a “golden age” of game shows? When was it?
Whenever the term “golden age” is used with television, it tends to refer to the 50s. I don’t think you can really call the 50s a golden age of game shows in light of what we found out about those shows and how they operated.
I honestly think the best time for game shows was the 1970s. First of all, sheer numbers. In 1975 alone, there were 44 game shows in production. I read a statistic once, I can't find it now , but it was something to the effect of this: In New York City in 1977, you could turn on your TV at 9 a.m., and if you changed the channel at the right moments, you could watch game shows continuously until 8 p.m. each day. And not only were there a bunch of game shows on the air, but they were different shows. Truth or Consequences, The Joker’s Wild, The $10,000 Pyramid, Hollywood Squares, Jackpot, Concentration…they were different. You couldn't mistake one show for the other. The producers and networks were willing to try everything on game shows and it was just fun seeing all the games of that era.
What’s your favorite game show past and present? Why?
Past: Match Game
Present: The Chase
What moments in game show history stand out to you?
Thom McKee’s big win on Tic Tac Dough – you can have a big winner who achieves celebrity status and wins a fortune without having to fix it, and it was a show that had been fixed in its original form in the 1950s, funnily enough.
Michael Larson’s victory on Press Your Luck – An enterprising win that broke no rules but took advantage of a system
September 4, 1972 – CBS introduces three new game shows: The Price is Right, The Joker’s Wild; Gambit. The presentation and the style of these shows represented a turning point; more flash, more pizzazz, more money, synthesized music, modernized sets.
What are game show’s target audience? Has it changed over the years?
(Defer to Bob Boden.)
Do some shows exploit people’s greed / put people in harm’s way?
It really depends on how you define “exploit.” Let’s talk about exploiting people’s greed, first of all. The literal dictionary definition of “exploit,” I suppose yes, they’re exploiting greed to some extent because there is luster and allure and appeal to the big cash prize at the end.
On the other hand, the greed can’t be the central element of the program. The grand prize is the icing on the cake. But when was the last time you just ate icing with no cake?
As far as putting people in harm’s way; I can remember shortly after “Survivor” went on the air, Johnny Carson sort of emerged from hiding and wrote an essay about the state of television and he said something to the effect of “They’re in as much danger as I’m in when I eat breakfast.” On these reality shows, there are some legitimate hazards I’m sure, but at the same time, the show and the network will never put contestants in genuine danger if for no other reason that it’s a PR disaster. You don’t want to deal with a dead or critically injured contestant and if you try to justify it with “Well, they signed a release form!” you just make it worse.
To me, “exploit” would suggest that there’s a victim who is being coerced or deceived, but anybody who appears on a show like this knows what they’re getting into.
Are Jeopardy, Wheel, Price is Right the last of a dying breed?
I hope not and there’s no reason that they should be. Over in England, there are some truly wonderful new game shows emerging from some producers who are very dedicated and have a good mind for good games. Here in the US, there are people in the production end like Jason Antoniewicz, Caleb Nelson and Mandel Ilagan who have had their hands in some of the better game shows to come along. As long as there are people in the business who have the sense to put a greater priority on the game than the show, we’ll have good game shows. Maybe not as many and maybe not as high profile as the games of the past but we can always count on having a good game here or there as long as people like that keep making their way into the business.
What’s in store for the future? Will we ever see “The Running Man”?
You know, you don’t want to think it could happen, but in Pennsylvania there was an incident a while back where guards were arranging fights between prisoners and awarding prizes to the winners. There was a similar scandal at a halfway house in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Over in Thailand it’s not even a scandal. They actually have an organized prison fight system where prisoners have organized fights and the prize is freedom. So the earliest form of The Running Man is already taking place. I don ‘t think we’ll get it to the extreme degree that the movie and the book presented, but I could absolutely see a very tame version of it happening on television in my lifetime. Maybe the lesser offenders; have a tax evader compete against an embezzler in a game of chess.
