You're about to get sick of game shows. So instead of waiting for the fad to run its course, the four major networks have decided to force feed you, figuring they'll suck all they can out of their oil well before it dries up. Television has become efficient at eating itself.
With ABC running Who Wants to Be a Millionaire three days a week and the other major networks airing prime-time quiz shows, professional contestants around the country are enjoying a gold rush that would make an Internet entrepreneur jealous. Daniel Avila used to have to make a phone call at least to get on a game show. Avila, who began his quiz-show career in 1974 on Joker's Wild, had since appeared on shows like Jeopardy! and Sale of the Century, so he knew the ropes. But in these contestant-needy times, he actually got a call from Greed asking him to try out. Avila, a photographer, could tell the show was put together in just three weeks. "From the time I tested on Saturday to the time I taped the show on Wednesday, the rules had actually changed," he says. "Later the writers had to change things because they didn't expect us to get so far." Even hosts are in demand. "I'm delighted to have him, but Chuck Woolery was a choice based on the speed scenario," concedes Mike Darnell, Fox executive vice president for specials. "I had a week to hire someone." Gene Rayburn died a few months too early.
The producers and network executives involved in these new shows--Millionaire, Fox's Greed, CBS' Winning Lines, NBC's Twenty One and forthcoming ones including CBS' $64,000 Question, ABC's Mastermind and You Don't Know Jack--admit they were caught short by Regis Philbin's success. But they are making up for it, piling on 6 1/2 hours of prime-time quizzing a week--as much as in the game-show heyday of the '50s. "Honestly, I had not been thinking about game shows before Millionaire," says Darnell. When offered a show by Dick Clark, he liked the idea right away. "I said, 'I love the idea of a group rather than one person. But let's go back and make it more Foxlike.'" That, of course, meant giving team members the chance to eliminate one another and renaming the show Greed. Why there are no car crashes is unclear.
Five days before the new Twenty One aired, NBC Studios president Ted Harbert and Garth Ancier, president of entertainment for the network, were still putting the show together, including the racial composition of the sequined, leggy babes who lead contestants onstage. They wanted ethnic diversity but feared that a black or Latino woman would conjure up stereotypes of subservient minorities opening doors. The show is to be a dumbed-down version of the rigged show from the '50s. But it's refreshingly unafraid of its past, choosing to copy its set design from the Robert Redford movie about the scandal. "If anything, our history helps us," says Harbert. "The joke around our show is that we didn't fix the original, we're repairing it." All publicity really is good publicity.
CBS, meanwhile, is offering Winning Lines, a British import that will test the limits of Americans' willingness to stay home Saturday nights to do math word problems.