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Sunday, Nov 22, 2009
Long before "Survivor," the eccentric who created "The Gong Show" discovered that people will do anything to get on TV, and others will watch them.
Mar 6, 2001 | Once upon a time, before hapless couples tortured each other by frolicking with beautiful "singles," before a naked, ruthless corporate trainer won a million bucks for outscheming 15 opponents in the South China Sea, before "The Mole" and "Big Brother" and "Who Wants to Be," or "Marry," or barbecue, or whatever, "a Millionaire," before Oprah and Jerry and Maury and Ricki, even before we found out what happens when people stop being polite and start getting real, there was "The Dating Game."
Quaint and gentle by today's standards, with its Herb Alpert theme music, giant daisy set decorations and double-entendre-laden interplay between bachelors and "bachelorettes," "The Dating Game" went on the air in December 1965 and was the first success of a producer named Chuck Barris, who had an idea whose simplicity belies its genius: People will do anything to get on TV, and other people will watch them.
Thirty-five years later, that idea dominates television. Chuck Barris, the King of Schlock, the Baron of Bad Taste, the Ayatollah of Trasherola, remembered now mostly as the loopy, squinty-eyed host of "The Gong Show," is the godfather of reality TV.
"Game shows have always operated on the premise that ordinary people are the stars of the show," says Steven Stark, author of "Glued to the Set: The 60 Television Shows That Made Us Who We Are Today," "but he raised it to an art form in the sense that you don't just show ordinary people in favorable circumstances -- you may do badly on a quiz show but you still look OK anyway -- but you can humiliate them and they'll still go on, for their 15 minutes of fame or whatever."
Barris didn't just introduce humiliation to daytime TV. "The Dating Game" and its 1966 companion, "The Newlywed Game," were among the first shows to acknowledge that people actually have sex. And they were game shows based on exploring human relationships, rather than simply answering general knowledge questions or solving puzzles. And the prizes were modest -- a restaurant dinner, a new washer and dryer. The real prize wasn't a big cash payoff, it was being on TV in the first place. "There wasn't a need for big prizes," Barris wrote about "The Newlywed Game" in the first of his two autobiographies. "The possibility of being on coast-to-coast television was tempting enough to lure the newlyweds to our studios."
"Music changed when the Beatles arrived," David Schwartz, the editor of the Encyclopedia of TV Game Shows, told Entertainment Weekly in 1999, "and game shows changed when Chuck Barris' shows came on."
Barris also changed the industry behind the scenes -- an accidental innovation that's had an even greater impact on television than his on-screen successes, and will continue to do so long after the reality craze fades, if it ever does. When one of his shows, "The Parent Game," was dropped from the NBC schedule before the first episode aired in 1972, Barris bought back the pilot and sold the show to local stations one at a time. Thus was born first-run syndication, a multibillion-dollar industry.
