Dead Tree Alert: Showcase Showdown!

Geez, talk about over-thinking a topic...

Price is "great" only to the extent that its flashy and fast paced, and highly segmented -- unlike night-time game shows which milk ever possible opportunity for "suspense" and drag a single game out forever, daytime game shows have to be designed for the housewife who doesn't want to miss anything crucially important because she is emptying the clothes dryer.

But its really a crap show---especially in its dependence upon prices that are purely imaginary (The Manufacturers Suggested Retail Price IS....), and big ticket "luxury" items that few members of its audience have a clue regarding actual cost(A Pair of Jet Skis!); both are unrelated to the consumer culture reality that you declaim is an essential element of the show.

As to the "best" game show, I'd have to go with the original version of Password. You didn't have to be a genius to "play along", but it did require you to think...and the "lightning rounds" were always exciting. Allan Ludden was the perfect game show host -- and his wife and most frequent Celebrity Guest Star (Betty White) was the perfect game show celebrity.

Take on Orbitz with Wink Martindale! Oh wait, that's a commercial.

My least favorite practice on the Price Is Right is that of bidding either only a single dollar or one dollar over the highest amount during Contestents' Row. Cheap, that's what that is.

Price is, as Dane Cook said, the show to watch when you're home sick. It's perfect when viewed through eyes made glassy by NyQuil.

I have to agree with Gerry (and Dane) about TPIR being the best when home sick and loopy on NyQuil. But my vote for absolute greatest game show would have to be Wheel of Fortune.

WoF relies on skill, knowledge, strategy, and luck, in fairly balanced measure. Being a Poindexter is no help if you get greedy and keep spinning until Bankrupt hits, and being the luckiest or most cunning person in the world is useless if you buy an A with S_NNY S_D_ _P on the board.

Wheel scales well from young to old, and can be educational for the whole family (not just for spelling -- "Okay kids, let's look up COOS BAY on the Internet") as well as an awesome drinking game for adults. (The latter which I know from much experience.) I've read that some folks use the show to help improve their English, and admittedly you can argue whether that's a good thing or not. But still, I doubt the thought could even be broached for most any other game show all the way from Press Your Luck up to Jeopardy.

Being willing and able to pack up the whole WoF game and crew into a few RV's and trucks, and set up in any decent sized venue, means they can take it on the road, out into the Heartland where average folks within driving distance (not just those visiting sunny Burbank) have a shot at being in and on the show. This also keeps us at home from having to watch the same basic cheesy set day after day, year after year.

Which leads finally, to my thought that WoF will simply age better than TPIR, and not just because Wheel seems to make an effort to keep itself updated and occasionally add new twists. I can watch a rerun of Wheel from 15-20 years ago and get into the kitschy retro-ness of Vanna in one of her Goddess of Love-era gowns as she manually turns the letters, and the puzzles are still fun to solve even without jackpots and mystery prizes.

Otoh, watching a TPIR rerun where a breathless contentant tries to guess the price of Joy dishwashing liquid so they can win a 1988 K-car is really, you know, kinda depressing.

I'd originally thought about posting another follow-up to this thread over the weekend, not to talk about the *greatest* game show, but about how I missed the genre of "celebrity cocktail hour disguised as game show" which was popular back in the 70's. To go along with TPIR, my sick days at home invariably included the "laughter is the best medicine" bookends of the Hollywood Squares and and Match Game ('73 edition).

I was too young to get some of the jokes and double entendres they threw around, but half the fun was the physical humor of watching them (and various other inanimate objects) being thrown. Hollywood Squares of course is a cultural icon, but Match Game had its own cachet. Before Comedy Central, before VH1 and its various celebrity combo "reality" shows, we basically got to sit in on a daily happy hour / roast with the likes of Brett Somers, Charles Nelson Reilly, Betty White, Richard Dawson, Fannie Flagg, and various others just trying to keep up -- while Gene Rayburn prowled the stage with his foot-long microphone and acted as our vaudevillian host when he could take a break from leering at the pretty women.

There was no redeeming educational value to Match Game (at least H-Squares occasionally had informative trivia), and it's pretty clear the contestants were there strictly as McGuffins -- but it was bawdy, campy, goofy fun. I guess I wasn't the only one who appreciated it ... I honestly didn't realize until I checked Wikipedia, but apparently it was the #1 game show for several years in the 70s.

In these days with celeb-fests a-plenty on TV, it's hard to imagine there was a time when you could get six to nine celebs up on a stage and have a show where they basically just had some drinks and laughs and then called it a day. They weren't competing against each other for anything other than who could tell the best joke, and there was no-one (that I can remember) vying to see how badly they could humiliate, hurt, out-shout or out-politic anyone else.

Naturally, all this fun masked some turmoil (and ugly real-world addictions) in the background, and the various "Behind the..." and Biography-type series dutifully spell out the darker sides of what went on when the cameras were off. These celebs weren't necessarily happy about their lot, and being on these shows often came at a cost, but at least they got to retain more dignity and display more originality than your average Surreal Life participant.

Anyway, I'd thought about writing all this on Saturday but decided the freshness date on the game show entry had probably passed. Then I saw just now the news that Charles Nelson Reilly passed away on Friday, and decided to go ahead and write this up, at least as an ethereal thanks to him if nothing else. He and the others brought guilt-free laughter five days a week into at least one home which often really needed the distraction, and that to me is about the best TV you can have.

I too was coming here to extol the sheer joy of Match Game. I think my problem with most game shows is that I don't much care about the contestants (non-celebrities on TV bore me, hence my contempt for reality shows), so my interest skews more toward high-functioning home-audience-participation concepts like Jeopardy! But Match Game didn't care much about the contestants either; this was a show about half a dozen C-list celebs making each other laugh (often with cocktails and cigarettes positioned at their stations, further amplifying the good-time vibe).

These qualities probably remove it from true contention against Price is Right and other "classic" game shows, but for my money (hah!) Match Game is the (blank) of all time.

To the producers of The Price is Right

Rumor has it u r going to hire rosie odonnal to host the show. I dont believe this would be a good move, I for one and my house will not watch the show any more, and the hospital where I work will not air the show. Please reconsider your choice. Thank you Doug B.

Watch out fans! The Price is Right is the most watched game show on ere. We already miss Bob tremendously, how can it be better with everyone complaining? Drew so far is doing a fab job, we all know that his shoes are a big space to fill. And to Roger (the producer of the show), thanks for all that you have done and are still doing, we love you, especially me!!:)