He once wrote a lovely essay for Sports Illustrated in which he described promising to marry his future wife if Jim Plunkett of the Oakland Raiders completed a touchdown pass in the football game they were listening to on the radio in Los Angeles. Some of the stories in the first book are repeated in the second, but with differing details. In his second memoir, "The Game Show King: A Confession," in 1993, he made nary a mention of his CIA fantasy, or even of the first book. Not that what he writes can be trusted anyway: He filled his first, "Confessions of a Dangerous Mind: An Unauthorized Autobiography," in 1984, with tales of his adventures as a CIA assassin. Although he's written two autobiographies, he hasn't gone into much detail about his childhood. Thus was born first-run syndication, a multibillion-dollar industry.Ĭhuck Barris grew up in Philadelphia, where he was born in 1929. 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.
#CHUCK BARRIS PICTURES WIFE LYN LEVY TV#
"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."īarris 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. "The possibility of being on coast-to-coast television was tempting enough to lure the newlyweds to our studios." "There wasn't a need for big prizes," Barris wrote about "The Newlywed Game" in the first of his two autobiographies. The real prize wasn't a big cash payoff, it was being on TV in the first place. And the prizes were modest - a restaurant dinner, a new washer and dryer. And they were game shows based on exploring human relationships, rather than simply answering general knowledge questions or solving puzzles. "The Dating Game" and its 1966 companion, "The Newlywed Game," were among the first shows to acknowledge that people actually have sex. "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."īarris didn't just introduce humiliation to daytime TV. 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. Thirty-five years later, that idea dominates television. 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. 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." T he indelibly daffy game shows like "The Dating Game," "The Newlywed Game" and "The Gong Show" that he created hinged on the very straight forward notion that people would do anything to get on television and, once there, the rest of us would watch them. This in the comparably innocent age before that broadcast contagion could claim credit for introducing Americans to their next president. On MaSalon published a profile of Chuck Barris authored by King Kaufman crediting Barris, who, at 87, died on Tuesday at his home in Palisades, N.Y., with fathering reality-television.
This Salon video was produced by Jason Stormer
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