We're Playing for Keeps

Brandweek, May 8, 2000 by Becky Ebenkamp

What's driving the staggering success of ABC'S Who Wants to be a Millionaire? a) Rampant greed; b) Suspenseful timing; c) Charismatic Regis and his monochromatic wardrobe; or, d) The current influx of Internet millionaires rewriting the rules of how wealth is acquired and causing everyone to sit up and wonder, where the hell is my share of the loot? The correct answer depends, of course, on which lifeline you choose.

Over the past half century, the look and style of game shows has changed more times than Madonna's hairdo, but the format is as old as TV itself. And like all genres inevitably do, they go in and out of style.

"TV audiences have always been fickle," said Michael K. Fleming, president of Game Show Network, a cable station that has seen its reach grow to 27 million households over the past year as the genre's popularity has resurged. "Five years ago, we'd be talking about sitcoms. Two years ago, hour-long dramas. The culture has a strong focus on financials right now, and we've never seen prizing like this."

Overall, Fleming offers less transitory reasons for Millionaire's insanely high numbers, the staples that good, successful game shows share regardless of the social climate in which they air. Among them, the ability for viewers to see themselves in the contestants, a compelling, competitive element and, naturally, the cash reward. The upping of the ante got people to tune in to Millionaire, the other aspects keep them watching.

"On many levels, it's what we've already seen on game shows: the prizing, competing, in this case against one's self," Fleming said. "But they've added some things that are mind-boggling to game show architects, such as giving the player the question before they decide to fold. And the reward, of course, is significant."

Stuart Fischoff, professor of media psychology at Cal State Los Angeles, takes the financial factor a step further in light of today's IPO fever and day-trading phenom. In an era when everyone seems to be getting rich overnight, "the obvious connection is the money factor, the greed that can be observed in our culture today," Fischoff said. "A lot of people think the only chance they have of getting rich is through a lottery ticket, and now you have game shows, where you can get rich because you have a good knowledge of trivia. As the chasm between the haves and the have-nots increases, so will people's interest in these shows."

Like many others, he likens the current environment to the '50s, when game shows were born--an era of challenging quiz shows like 21 and The $64,000 Question, whose popularity reflected a country obsessed with finances, but also smarts.

"In the postwar period, everyone was concerned with making money, that was the zeitgeist," Fischoff said. One interesting aspect then: "There was an air of innocence. People were impressed with intellect, it was a far more important value that shows of the time reflected in society," he said.

Author Steven Stark agrees. "It's no surprise that traditional stereotyped shows promoting consumption and competition tend to be most popular in conservative eras, such as the 1950s and 1980s," he wrote in the book Glued to the Set (Delta). "Conversely, game shows that tend to attract large audiences in more-liberal eras frequently soften the acquisitive and cutthroat tone," such as The Dating Game in the '60s. "In an era when it was less fashionable to be materialistic--no one was supposed to go home from Woodstock to watch The Price is Right--[Chuck] Barris developed game shows revolving around relationships and 'letting it all hang out.'"

The effect of the anti-establishment period was even felt in the more traditional shows: In a rather stark juxtaposition, To Tell the Truth's tux- & gown-clad New York society-figure panelists like Kitty Carlyle could now be seen "letting it all hang out" on eye-bleedingly psychedelic sets.

Shortly thereafter, game shows moved to morning strip time slots, as broadcast nets owned the 12-3 p.m. block after local programming and before afternoon soaps. "Like the era, everything was looser," Fleming said. "And it really changed how people saw game shows."

It was a very irreverent time in our history, said Jake Tauber, evp of GSN, so joke-fueled shows like Match Game were a perfect fit. The next big star was Family Feud, launched in the mid '70s. "In the late '60s and early '70s during the Vietnam War, many families were pitted against each other," said Tauber. "Maybe that had something to do with that show's popularity."

In his book, Stark presents some pretty bold theories about how game shows, in turn, have shaped popular culture. For example, game shows' "buy now" philosophy helped disintegrate the protestant work ethic of delayed gratification at a time when the nation was experiencing a newfound prosperity. Quiz show scandals, he hypothesizes, were the first indication of the public's eroding trust, a foreshadowing of responses to such events as the Kennedy assassination and its companion conspiracy theories, false reports of successes in Vietnam and the Watergate cover-up. The Dating Game and other Chuck Barris shows were among the first to televise the sexual revolution by openly admitting that people actually did have sex, thus paving the way for more risque programming, even tabloid TV