The Price Is Righteous

By James Poniewozik

Everbody loves Bob Barker -- everyone, let's say, except the occasional litigious ex--Barker's Beauty or unwillingly neutered collie. And everybody respects Bob Barker. Since he announced his retirement from The Price Is Right (he tapes his last show June 6), the plaudits have rolled in: he has been called a legend, an institution, a record-setting pro.

The Price Is Right, though, that's a different story. Oh, people like the show. They remember fondly how Plinko and the Range Game got them through sick days, newborn nursing, freshman wake-and-bake sessions and periods between jobs.

But respect? It's not that critics treat any game show as if it were The Sopranos. But even within the world of game shows, there's a caste system. At the bottom, of course, is National Bingo Night. At the top are the scholarly quiz shows, which reward what we are conditioned from school to think of as "learning." Somewhere in the great liked-but-not-respected middle are the daytime shows like Price made for people outside the 9-to-5 working world.

The Respectable Game Show was a phenomenon of the atomic-age early days of TV, when postwar America embraced the idea of meritocracy and trusted in the best and brightest to conquer space and whup the Russkies. What's My Line? and To Tell the Truth were urbane soirees, frequented by brainiacs and swells like publisher Bennett Cerf and arts advocate Kitty Carlisle, and quiz shows celebrated academics. Twenty-One scandalized the nation--and isn't it quaint to think of Americans being scandalized over a game show?--because people wanted to believe in intellectual Charles Van Doren, who was fed answers. Jeopardy! and Who Wants to Be a Millionaire follow that tradition, quizzing contestants on literature and science, things classy people are supposed to know about. Even Wheel of Fortune is, at least, about language skills.

No one, on the other hand, is ever going to be dubbed the smartest man in America, as Ken Jennings was, for winning a Showcase Showdown. Price rewards skills that are dismissed as instinctual, nonacademic--let's be honest: housewifely. (Jeopardy!, which favors the kind of buzz-in-first competition boys get drilled into them early, historically had problems getting female contestants.) Players don't show up on Jeopardy! in IT'S-MY-40TH-BIRTHDAY T shirts. They dress for it as if it were a job interview. Contestants leave not with refrigerators but with paychecks. Jeopardy! is about breadwinning; Price is about bread buying. (Wheel used to have a shopping segment in which contestants spent their winnings on trips and lawn furniture, but it gave up the declasse--and fun--segment when it became a big-deal evening show.)

But ultimately, what wins Price are the skills that matter. Remembering facts (and I say this as a ruthless Trivial Pursuit player) is a pretty low form of intelligence, a Poindexter skill that gets less useful the further you get from your SAT. Players on Price apply knowledge--they calculate, make bets and take risks on the basis of comparisons and past experience--which is a whole different level of intelligence from regurgitating data.

What Price really tests is how to be a capitalist: how to survive in a consumer economy in which life is a constant struggle to defend the contents of your wallet. On Price, as in life, the vast groaning board of the consumer economy is laid out before you--buffet servers! Jet Skis! dinette sets!--and you must choose. What do you want? What do you need? And what is it worth?

This sounds like knee-jerk populism, but Price skills are as important to the biggest fish as to penny-scroungers. Quiz-show skills are the stuff of middlebrow success, of the star pupils who do their homework, please their teachers and go on to earn solid middle-manager salaries. But business fortunes are built, like Pick-a-Pair victories, on risk, a little luck and pricing assets: calculating, assessing value and never overbidding. (And against a ticking clock.) People who do that are the ones who amass billions, drive the economy and bankroll politicians. They don't need to know when the Magna Carta was signed; they hire the guy who does.

Price matters more than any quiz show because it's like life. It's random: you don't take a qualifying test but are picked from the crowd. It's social: studio-audience help is not forbidden but encouraged, if often wrong. And it's a little savage: yes, I will bid one dollar over you. Price will keep testing consumers after Barker takes his well-earned rest. And if he ever wants to get a glimpse of real America in his leisurely late mornings, he knows where to come on down.