Why we love game shows

When news emerged in February that the IBM supercomputer called Watson would be taking on Jeopardy! champions Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter, it was hard not to feel a slight shudder: Now they’ve come for our game shows. But the contest, aside from demonstrating that an electrical signal is faster than a flesh-and-blood thumb, ended up just reminding us — as Ken and Brad simmered and struggled — why TV game shows have been popular almost from the medium’s inception. It’s about who wins or loses, yes, but it’s also about the display of human hopes and fears, laughter and disappointment.

Two of the most popular game shows in television history, Jeopardy! and Wheel of Fortune, have thrived for decades because they offered the pleasures of playing at home — can you beat the folks on-screen? — and of watching the contestants’ emotional roller-coaster ride. But essential ingredients for both shows are their hosts: Jeopardy!’s Alex Trebek and Wheel’s Pat Sajak, who say that the secret of their success and professional longevity — 27 years for Trebek, 30 for Sajak — is that they recognize what really matters to the games. “Realize first of all that you are not the star. The star is the game and the contestants,” Trebek says.

And yet the two hosts’ very unobtrusiveness — they are so charming and genial that you hardly notice the steely efficiency with which they move the shows along — is what helped ensure they have become fixtures in millions of U.S. homes since the early 1980s. Now Trebek and Sajak are getting lifetime achievement awards from the Daytime Entertainment Emmy Awards.

“There is something disconcerting about the term ‘lifetime achievement’ because there are certain implications,” Sajak says. Indeed, even though he’s still happily letting Wheel contestants buy a vowel and Trebek is cheerfully taking Daily Double wagers on Jeopardy!, it’s not clear how much longer that will be the case.

Trebek sounds as if he’ll be the first to unplug his microphone. “I have three years on my contract and I keep telling the guys, hey, I don’t think I’m going to make it to the end,” Trebek says. “The thing that would prompt me to leave would be if I saw a significant diminution in my ability to do a good job.” Still, he says, three more years would give him an even 30: “That has a nice sound to it. Complete the circle.”

Sajak, having already reached his 30th year with Wheel, says, “I’d like to leave when the show is still No. 1”— it has ruled nighttime syndication since 1984 — “or still very popular, and I would like to leave before people start saying, ‘What the hell happened to him?’”

In some ways, the lifetime achievement Emmys also will be recognizing the role that the television game shows themselves have played in American popular culture. When Truth or Consequences launched on TV in 1950 with host Ralph Edwards, the show and the host were already a decade-long radio success. Quickly, though, game shows became a television signature. Their popularity, Trebek says, was tied to “the American dream. Anybody can be president, anybody can be rich, anybody can be famous, anybody can win, and game shows provide ordinary citizens with an opportunity to do that.”

From the start, the term game show has been applied to an astonishing variety of programs. The genre has embraced everything from Let’s Make a Deal and Deal or No Deal to The Newlywed Game and Love Connection. The quiz show scandals of the 1950s sunk that subgenre for nearly half a century, but it surged back a dozen years ago with Who Wants to Be a Millionaire and then The Weakest Link before its popularity faded in the age of Google.

Game shows also have been prodigious generators of pop-culture catchphrases. “Final answer?” evokes Regis Philbin on Millionaire. But that line is just one in a game-show lexicon that includes Monty Hall’s “Is it door No. 1 ...” on Let’s Make a Deal, Bob Barker’s “Come on down” on The Price Is Right, and Richard Dawson’s “Survey says ...” on Family Feud.

The heyday of game shows has clearly passed — the Game Show Network, where it always seems to be 1974, with Gene Rayburn’s Match Game, gives a glimpse of the golden age. Game shows have been casualties, like so much else on TV, of audience declines and the fracturing of interests.

In truth, though, game shows are still doing well — but under an assumed identity: “reality” television. After all, Trebek says, programs like Survivor and The Amazing Race are really just bulked-up game shows: “The games are a little more involved, and the prizes are substantial.” And, he says, “you see a lot of emotions.” Until IBM figures out how to make Watson laugh or cry, TV audiences are still going to seek out shows where they can watch the games people play.