Television: Truth and Consequences

The wit, wisdom and rude shocks of game shows

Game shows are one of the embarrassing little secrets in American Pop culture. Even confessed TV addicts do not readily admit that they watch the games: it would be more respectable to concede a passion for The Misadventures of Sheriff Lobo than The New High Rollers. But the games survive. Not only do they outlast their critics, but they also outlive scandals, inflation and the dye jobs on their M.C.s' hair. Currently there are 30 hours of game shows on the networks' weekly daytime schedules, not to mention the countless hours of syndicated games broadcast in the early evening. Someone must be watching—and why not? Except for news, sports events and the Tonight show, game shows are just about the only examples of pure, spontaneous television left on the air. As Monty Hall says in Maxene Fabe's definitive new history, TV Game Shows! (Doubleday/Dolphin; $8.95), "You can learn more about America by watching one half-hour of Let's Make a Deal than you can by watching Walter Cronkite for an entire month." Of course, what you learn is not always good news.

To get the most out of game shows, one must be perversely fascinated by the sleazy minutiae of show business and highly tolerant of vulgarity. There is no longer any point in watching games to learn obscure historical facts or to see poor folks become fabulously wealthy overnight. Big money went out with Charles Van Doren and the scandals of the '50s; there has not been a game that really tested one's knowledge since Art Fleming's Jeopardy!, a cult favorite, was canceled by NBC in 1975. Aside from two skill-testing parlor games, Family Feud and The $20,000 Pyramid, all the current shows celebrate the theater of cruelty and the entertainment values of Las Vegas. Masochistic contestants meet fourth-rate Hollywood celebrities in a neon-lit orgy of product plugola, group hysteria and psychological mayhem.

The most famous of the grotesque games come from the fevered imagination of Chuck Barris. Beginning with The Dating Game (1965) and continuing through The Newlywed Game, The Gong Show and The $1.98 Beauty Contest, he has made a habit of finding contestants who willingly expose their sad sexual inadequacies, their inept performing skills and their physical homeliness to a nationwide audience. In Barris' latest and grossest gem, Three's a Crowd (which might well be titled The Divorce Game), wives and secretaries compete to see who knows the most intimate details about the man whom they share. The trouble with Barris' shows, at least from the point of view of a games connoisseur, is their self-consciousness. The bad taste is too rehearsed; Barris winks at his own jokes. Worse, the contestants expect humiliation, indeed court it, and therefore feel pleasure rather than pain when they are made to look ridiculous. That is why Barns' series lack the lifelike excitement of true games: they are really preprogrammed sitcoms.