Book: Emcee Monty Hall

[TimK2003]

Anybody else notice how Monty seemed to try so hard to become a Trebek-like host for his Split Second reboot?  Yeah, it's a more serious show than LMAD, but he was not as laid back as the original Kennedy version was.

[carlisle96]

I think that while hosting LMAD was a positive experience for Monty, I always got the impression he felt that his hosting typecasted him and he had problems finding roles where he could act and sing. In the documentary, Deal!, The Making of Let's Make a Deal, Monty talks about how some have described LMAD as being "about greed." This description obviously upset him, as he tersely explained that he felt LMAD was never about greed. Watching the show, some contestants were perfectly happy being offered no more than $500 for an unknown box or curtain. It would be highly unlikely they would play for the Big Deal, but that didn't matter to some.

In terms of Monty guest starring on TV shows, at least a few times he played a character, or "himself", but not as a game show host. He did The Odd Couple, once as the LMAD host, and another time as himself, but in that one he got to sing. He also played a dentist that used hypnosis to numb pain in That Girl!, and on The Love Boat, he played a character.

An old time radio shpow collector has posted 2 episodes of a 1949 CBC comedy show called "The Wrigley Show." Monty is the announcer abnd plays stooge to comedienne Mildred Moray. He's excellent.

[RMF]

In the 1960's, ABC seemed to be the "counter culture" to daytime with all the Chuck Barris shows and "Dark Shadows".  Acquiring LMAD made it "legit" and probably paved the way for the traditional shows like "Password" to fit comfortably in the schedule.  It was as though they stopped programming for the college crowd and more for the homemaker. 

There are limitations to that sentiment, in several regards:

1) It feels reductive with quite a bit that ABC aired in daytime pre-LMAD: can we really call Treasure Isle, Dream House, or Wedding Party counter-cultural in any sense, for instance?

2) It exaggerates how rapidly the ABC daytime schedule changed- in part because they programmed fewer hours than the other two networks, there wasn't massive immediate churn, and even some of the new programs don't seem that far removed (some of the short-lived soap operas around 1970, for instance, seem to fit in the efforts ABC had engaged in earlier of having these appeal to a younger audience).

3) Finally, there is an important general context to keep in mind- ABC as a network overall programmed for a younger audience than NBC and CBS did at that time, in an effort to find an audience that could make it something other than the distant third network. It took some time to work overall (in the late 1960s, it was still considerably behind NBC, who in turn weren't that close to CBS), but by the mid-1970s this would pay off, and to a heavy degree this approach to programming is the one that had become dominant with all the broadcast television networks.