First off, ThomHuge, you didn't give your opinion as to whether Price has jumped the shark. So, yes or no, in your opinion, has Price jumped the shark?
I honestly don't think it has...but I also think they're showing some of the precursor symptoms to it. It feels like the show is more gimmicky than it needs to be, and they go for the artificial highs (like hypercaffeinated contestants) instead of letting their natural personalities and the show's own format carry the day. I should've been more clear, the reference to the celebrity shows and specials was more about the fact that they seemed to be trying to distract from the basic game with a lot of unnecessary fluff, than the fact that celebs were crowding out regular people.
Comparing The Price is Right to Richard Karn-hosted Family Feud isn't fair at all. Drew Carey as a host has gotten better over the years; Richard Karn never did (or at least not by much.) Family Feud used celebrities as contestants; not once that I know of has any TPiR episode ever used celebrities as contestants, except the one episode during Gameshow Marathon. The celebrities that are featured are there to help the contestants win, a pattern which has worked well on many shows like Pyramid, Password, and Match Game. That said, do I wish TPiR wouldn't use celebrities at all? Yes, I do, as I don't care about celebrities and they just take away time the show is already tight on. But this is not like late seasons of Karn Family Feud or the ABC run of Millionaire where celebrities were constantly playing instead of contestants.
You're absolutely right, Drew has improved significantly since season 36, which Karn didn't do in the three/four years he was on Feud...and for that matter, Drew's improved fairly consistently over the time he's hosted the show. Actually on second thought I don't think "improved" is quite the right word...I think it's fairer to say he's gotten more comfortable, both with the show's particulars and the format in general. He's a stand-up comedian so not hard to imagine Price's audience-participation format took some getting used to.
The formats of the other shows you mentioned seemed to lend themselves to celebrity partnerships better than Price does--you have contestants that can be tested and pre-vetted, and their gameplay structures seem to lend themselves well to including celebrities in the actual gameplay. Price's format doesn't, because you're picking people more or less at random after a 30-second interview. That's not exactly an airtight vetting process. And as you point out, they're more pressed for time now than ever, so any celebrity cameos or participation inevitably takes time away from the nine people we really tuned in to watch.
I agree with you--I wish they'd stop doing it altogether and refocus on the contestants.
I'm also not sure I'd call the current TPiR set super-flashy. Yes, the video wall behind the showcase podiums can be distracting. But otherwise, they have a turntable, 3 doors, 4 contestants row podiums, and a large display in the back of the studio. It still feels like a modern version of the classic Price is Right set, not something completely new. If they went to the Davidson-era set, that would be what I would consider super flashy. Thank goodness they haven't.
I actually loved the Davidson set...but that's another discussion. When I wrote that part, I was fresh from looking at a Barker episode from the late 1990s (cushioned turntable, full credit roll, balloons on the doors but no "26 years" in the balloon, so I'm guessing season 27). Looking back, I feel that the set in those days was simple, functional, and tasteful, but without being overstated or distracting...and yes, I love the season 25-29 door designs. You knew it was there but it didn't pull your attention away from Bob and the player.
On the current set, seemingly everything lights up, changes color, or animates in some way. The video wall in the back of the house actually isn't that bad--but when you add in the LED strip, the light-up curtains (or whatever they are?), the lit asterisks on the walls, the LED borders on the contestants row displays, the LED stairs on Door #5, the video wall, the colored panels between the wall screens, the LED strips on the door frames (and the second strips inside the Big Doors themselves, that Door #5 doesn't have), the light-up doors themselves, the illuminated walls behind the door frames (and for that matter, the shiny silver frames themselves), the light-up dollar sign next to Door #1...and all that's not to mention George's podium...it seems really flashy by comparison. Modern, yes; commensurate with Pyramid and Match Game and PYL and Wheel and Jeopardy, absolutely; but flashy nonetheless.
And finally with regards to what I quoted, TPiR does how many special weeks a year? There's Kids Week, Dream Car Week, one or two Big Money Weeks...and that's all I can think of the top of my head. Feel free to correct me if I missed any, but that's 3-4 special weeks a year out of about 30 weeks of first-run shows. That's still 26-27 weeks of standard shows.
Big Money Week and Dream Car Week sound like natural expansions of the show's format, so those I can live with--Kids Week is tolerable but I don't really like kids so it's not for me. Even the pet adoption shows make sense given Bob's animal-rights involvement. But it's the really weird ones that I'm thinking of--like the expectant mothers one, or the sports one, the baby shower one, or basically any gimmick that involves more than one person per spot in Contestants Row. (I know I'm unique but the sports one I didn't even tune in to see, and from the recap it doesn't sound like I missed much...I don't really do sports to begin with, but I consider Price as the thing I would rather tune into than sports games, and with that in mind it was a relief back in the day when a Price primetime show was on at the same time as a game.)
Young people like to travel. No, actually, they love to travel. We are in an era where more people under the age of 40 or so travel as much as they can, eschewing standard "things" to do it. I bet if you were to run a poll of people under 40 what they'd like to win on the Price is Right, cars & trips would be close to tied and "everything else" (kitchen grills, new living rooms, etc.) would be *way* behind. And yes, it helps the show in that they can easily change the price of trips as needed by adding rental cars, excursions, extra meals, or whatever in order to make it harder to win them. But offering more trips will cause more young people to tune in and/or go to the show more than just about anything else besides straight cash and more cars.
As correct as this entire paragraph is, I'd like to offer one small counterpoint--even growing up I never looked at what was offered during the pricing games as the "point" of being on the show...yes I'd have loved to play a game for a car or a load of cash, but the real point was the wheel, which was how you got to the showcase.
That was where the real winning was; if playing for a stately grandfather clock or a popcorn cart was what it took to get to that point, I'd have been willing.
I'll also add...part of why I loved Price growing up was that there was, as Rod would've put it, "a wonderful array of prizes" on every show. It felt like you never knew what they were going to give away next. During season 37 I distinctly remember groaning when it felt like every other prize was a trip, and the other types of prizes were getting crowded out. It was especially bothersome to me when both showcases were nothing but trips, and even worse when it was just two trips; a good showcase is (in my book) at least three prizes, so two-prize/two-trip showcases always seemed like a terrible cop-out.
Regarding Pay the Rent, it's played about 8 times a year, again out of 160 or so first run shows. If the show needed that $100,000 top prize to draw in viewers, it'd be played more often.
This is true, but again, may I offer that growing up, I knew plenty of people who didn't really like TPiR but who would tune in if they saw Plinko, and might stick around for a few more acts. PtR isn't Plinko, but part of me still feels like PtR serves a similar purpose, if only because of YouTube--you don't have to play it as often for it to get exposure, and every YouTube hit equals another potential viewer who might say "maybe they'll play that game for $100k today."
Thus, to summarize: the changes they've made have made the show feel more modern, but not a different show and certainly not a show that looks desperate to get people to watch. If anything, it felt like they were falling behind the times toward the end of Bob's tenure, but of course there was a "as long as Bob is hosting, we don't want to change much of anything" thought at that time. So when Bob retired, the show had to hurry to catch up to 2007, and they tried anything they could to see what worked. Some things did, some things didn't, and some things really really didn't (*cough* fried chicken *cough*). But they've gotten to the point where they've seen what's worked and what hasn't. As you so eloquently said...
As I said; I think some of the things I mentioned are easily explainable as things the show had to do to modernize and survive in the world of broadcast TV that we have in 2019. I don't judge too harshly for that, and things like Dream Car Week or Big Money Week are examples of what doing that right looks like. Even the MDS from back in the day had the right idea, even if the Barker format missed the mark--I think they did a lot better with the season 36 ones. I just wish more of their ideas felt like organic expansions of the show's tried-and-true format, and less came across like the result of a Mad Libs game.
