Truth and Consequences

By Frank Rich

The wit, wisdom and rude shocks of game shows

Game shows are one of the embarrassing little secrets in American Pop culture. Even confessed TV addicts do not readily admit that they watch the games: it would be more respectable to concede a passion for The Misadventures of Sheriff Lobo than The New High Rollers. But the games survive. Not only do they outlast their critics, but they also outlive scandals, inflation and the dye jobs on their M.C.s' hair. Currently there are 30 hours of game shows on the networks' weekly daytime schedules, not to mention the countless hours of syndicated games broadcast in the early evening. Someone must be watching--and why not? Except for news, sports events and the Tonight show, game shows are just about the only examples of pure, spontaneous television left on the air. As Monty Hall says in Maxene Fabe's definitive new history, TV Game Shows! (Doubleday/Dolphin; $8.95), "You can learn more about America by watching one half-hour of Let's Make a Deal than you can by watching Walter Cronkite for an entire month." Of course, what you learn is not always good news.

To get the most out of game shows, one must be perversely fascinated by the sleazy minutiae of show business and highly tolerant of vulgarity. There is no longer any point in watching games to learn obscure historical facts or to see poor folks become fabulously wealthy overnight. Big money went out with Charles Van Doren and the scandals of the '50s; there has not been a game that really tested one's knowledge since Art Fleming's Jeopardy!, a cult favorite, was canceled by NBC in 1975. Aside from two skill-testing parlor games, Family Feud and The $20,000 Pyramid, all the current shows celebrate the theater of cruelty and the entertainment values of Las Vegas. Masochistic contestants meet fourth-rate Hollywood celebrities in a neon-lit orgy of product plugola, group hysteria and psychological mayhem.

The most famous of the grotesque games come from the fevered imagination of Chuck Barris. Beginning with The Dating Game (1965) and continuing through The Newlywed Game, The Gong Show and The $1.98 Beauty Contest, he has made a habit of finding contestants who willingly expose their sad sexual inadequacies, their inept performing skills and their physical homeliness to a nationwide audience. In Barris' latest and grossest gem, Three's a Crowd (which might well be titled The Divorce Game), wives and secretaries compete to see who knows the most intimate details about the man whom they share. The trouble with Barris' shows, at least from the point of view of a games connoisseur, is their self-consciousness. The bad taste is too rehearsed; Barris winks at his own jokes. Worse, the contestants expect humiliation, indeed court it, and therefore feel pleasure rather than pain when they are made to look ridiculous. That is why Barns' series lack the lifelike excitement of true games: they are really preprogrammed sitcoms.

Far better are the shows whose absurdity is a byproduct of seemingly innocent good intentions. Some of these are legendary. In NBC's The Diamond Head Game (1975), set on a Waikiki beach, contestants entered an isolation booth in a papier-mache volcano and dived for greenbacks that "erupted" from below. In ABC's Money Maze (1974), wives ran around, like rats in a huge labyrinth, after cash and merchandise. The Neighbors, chaired briefly by Regis Philbin in 1975, pitted actual neighbors against each other in the effort to discover who exhibited the most shabby behavior back home. Other outrageous games have been fronted by some of television's most esteemed personalities. Mike Wallace, who once investigated games on 60 Minutes, was the host of Who Pays? in 1959: on that show, players had to match butlers, chauffeurs and maids with their celebrity employers.

David Susskind prefigured Chuck Barris with Supermarket Sweep (1965), in which housewives raced down the aisles of a grocery store trying to stuff a cart with goodies. Mark Goodson and the late Bill Todman, usually the classiest of games producers (What's My Line?), are responsible for The New Price Is Right, the most frantic of current shows.

These days, however, some of the most bizarre games are those that feature stars rather than ordinary housewives. The trend solidified when the long-running Hollywood Squares first hit it big in 1966, thus inspiring a score of imitation shows built around show-business players. Unfortunately, there are not enough celebrities to go around; for some reason, big names like Redford and Streisand have not yet been persuaded to play Password Plus. To counteract this talent shortage, producers have created their own stars--often with unintentionally hilarious results. Game shows are often a grazing ground for feeble Borscht Belt comics and the depressed lead actors of canceled prime-time series. When these forgotten celebrities are not to be found, "stars" are literally created overnight. On The Match Game, Host Gene Rayburn always treats Player Brett Somers as if she were the toast of Beverly Hills--but had anyone ever heard of her before she did games? Carol Wayne has been doing a dumb blond (or, lately, dumb brunet) act for years on game shows, apparently on the premise that viewers might confuse her with Jayne Mansfield. Alex Trebek turns up on Hollywood Squares, even though his only claim to celebrityhood comes from serving as host on other game shows. Since the other squares are at times occupied by the likes of Vince Edwards, the Hudson brothers, the Gabor sisters and Margaret Truman, the viewer often feels as if he has stumbled into a video black hole full of fame's has-beens and never-weres.

Game shows are not always merry.

Like all chronicles of life's vicissitudes, they sometimes must confront death (though not always: Larry Blyden continued to appear on pretaped half-hours of What's My Line? for months after he died). Indeed, there are few TV spectacles more gripping than the dying throes of a game. A current example is CBS's Whew!, which is showing all the signs of imminent demise: in the past few weeks, this show has altered its rules, retitled it self Celebrity Whew! (among the first celebrities: Carol Wayne), and lost five minutes of its air time to the CBS Midmorning News. Such radical surgery, by TV standards, is as desperate as a Laetrile cure.

Even so, Whew! is not suffering as much pain as NBC's Celebrity Sweepstakes did three seasons ago. When that show's ratings slipped, the celebrities were suddenly deprived of their scripted gags and forced to give actual replies to real quiz questions. As Carol Wayne, Joey Bishop and the other panelists deliberated over weighty subjects, Celebrity Sweepstakes trailed off into ghostly stretches of silence.

No doubt NBC was mortified, but for viewers it was the eeriest TV drama since The Twilight Zone.

--Frank Rich

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.