Millionaire Mania : High times in '99 - Brief Article

National Review, Dec 20, 1999 by Rob Long

THE biggest hit on television asks a simple question. Who Wants To Be a Millionaire, the only must-see program of the current television season, asks contestants a series of general-knowledge questions, rewarding them in ever increasing amounts, until the final question, which is worth a whopping one million clams.

In late 1999, though, with a Dow inching its way to 12,000, it's hard not to do the math in your head. Let's be honest: A million dollars, after taxes, is what? Six hundred thousand? Say you've got a couple of kids. They want to go to college. That's two hundred apiece, right there. Throw in a modest house in a modest neighborhood, and you're tapped. As a stock- trader friend of mine put it recently, "A million dollars? After taxes and stuff, that's like, I dunno, a dinner and a movie?" And if, as a recent book suggests, we've all got a millionaire living next door and we're all just a "dot com" away from serious money, what, exactly, is the appeal of Who Wants To Be a Millionaire?

The appeal of the show, like the appeal of any show on television, is the drama. Watching people make difficult choices about money is pretty much the molten core of American dramatic entertainment, and, as old-fashioned as it sounds, a million dollars (okay, let's be honest, six hundred thousand dollars after the IRS claims its vig) is still a lot of money. And it's still fun to watch contestants mentally calculate, as the figures get higher and the questions get harder, how much they really need. Because when the time is up, and you're facing an impossible question, you can cut out and take what you've already won. But if you keep going and answer incorrectly, you lose big. Peering closely at their faces, the attentive viewer can see the contestants doing rapid long division in their heads-Okay, okay, 64 thousand is around 35 after taxes, pay off the Visa bill, that's 25, go to Disney World with family, now we're down to 20, pay off car, 15, kids may need braces, then college -until they look up, smile at Regis Philbin, the host, and say, "I'd like to keep going."

"Think of it," I told my stock-trader friend, "like playing the market. Do you hold? Do you sell? Do you buy more? In many ways, the show is a perfect evocation of the bull market." My stock-trader friend is still unimpressed. "You want me to watch?" he asked me. "Then make it interesting. Add a zero."

But even if they called it what it should be called-Who Wants Six Hundred Thousand After-Tax Dollars?-I'd still tune in. It's exciting stuff, in the old-time tradition of network television. Even Regis Philbin is a throwback to an earlier era. His Bowery Boys New York accent ("Who wans t'be a million ayeh?") and squinty grimaces are the opposite of game-show- host smooth. And though he tries for a regular-guy attitude, he looks a little nervous meeting all those ordinary people from all those strange not-Manhattan places. You half expect him to intone into an old radio mike, "Hello out there in radio land. From the heart of New York City it's . . . Who Wants To Be a Millionaire," and find yourself transported to 1940.

Except for the set, of course. All angles and flashing lights, with cameras swooping around for no real reason, the show is shot and dressed like an MTV

awards show. Regis and his contestant are perched up high, staring at flat-screen computer monitors, while in the background the lights get dramatic and the music starts getting tense and weirdly martial. The show looks the way someone in the 1950s might imagine a modern show to look, right down to Regis's monochrome suits. But they can dress it up all they want: It's strictly old-time, which is part of its mega-appeal.

It follows. The show is a British import. It was bought-premise, set, rules, and all-by ABC, which gambled (correctly, it turns out) that its huge success in the U.K. could be duplicated here, albeit at a discount. In Britain, on some nights, 80 percent of the television audience was glued to Millionaire. Here at home, where the time-slot competition is more likely to be Frasier than Dogs and Gardening, it draws a healthy, dependable 25 percent.

The English grumble that in their version the questions are harder and the game more challenging. This is true, of course, but the English version of almost anything (fiction, poetry, drama, weather, jurisprudence, social class, food) is harder to figure out. The point is that in the U.K. they have fewer television choices and a far less fragmented audience-sort of like us, 30 years ago-so the potential for a big, country-grabbing event is always there.

Who Wants To Be a Millionaire is a colorized, computerized snapshot from television's past. Paired with the other unexpected success of the television season, UPN's wrestling show Smackdown!, it's a humbling slice of pie for the platoons of development executives and creative minds who stuff the offices at the other networks. They have spent years searching for the magic formula to recapture dwindling audiences-Seinfeld clones and Friends clones and Simpsons clones and Dateline clones and, inexplicably, Veronica's Closet-only to see their audiences click off, boot up, and log on. Millionaire is an old idea with bull-market spin; it may just save broadcast television.