Game shows, TV’s ‘comfort food,’ gaining new favor

LONDON — In the game-show era, long before reality TV took over, Americans used to watch Bob Barker tell contestants to “Come on down!” and play “The Price Is Right.” It made small-screen stars out of average folk competing for anything from Campbell’s soup to a brand new Buick.

While the show is an international success, airing in 37 countries with versions such as India’s “Yehi Hai Right Price,” it’s now rapidly gaining ground again at home. Hosted by Drew Carey since 2007, the U.S. version averaged 4.83 million viewers a show last season, its biggest since 2004-2005, according to Nielsen TV ratings. “Family Feud,” in which families are pitted against each other to guess answers to polls, has doubled viewership in three years.

The two shows, along with “Let’s Make a Deal,” are enjoying bumper years, driven by witty hosts, formats that appeal to all ages and applications that allow users to play along at home on mobile devices. As the world’s largest TV content marketplace kicks off along the French Riviera on Monday, game formats new and old will be on display, rivaling dramas, comedies and new incarnations of reality TV being bought and sold by producers, broadcasters and studio executives.

“With a good host at the helm, game shows are the TV equivalent of comfort food,” said Chris O’Dell, head of global entertainment production at FremantleMedia, the owner of rights for the “Family Feud” and “Got Talent” franchises. “That’s why game shows keep coming back — maybe with a different host, or different look, but you can rely on them.”

For creators and broadcasters, the appeal is clear. Game shows can bring big audiences, with advertisers close behind, and they cost much less to produce than drama and most comedy. Plus the format travels well across cultures and languages.

At the four-day Mipcom event in Cannes, content peddlers and buyers will hear from love-him-or-hate-him TV host and talent-show mogul Simon Cowell, as well as Ted Sarandos, the chief content officer leading Netflix into producing original shows.

They’ll consider the game shows on offer, including “The Algorithm,” in which contestants predict the answers of other team members, from British production house All3Media, and FremantleMedia’s “Heaven or Hell,” where a player faces descending into a hell where he may be forced to shave his head, spray-tan his face or have stinging nettles shoved down his trousers.

Old favorites are also being revived. In the U.S., FremantleMedia is preparing a remake of “To Tell the Truth,” which first aired in 1956. The show, which has had a few brief revivals since going off the air in 1978, features four celebrities who question a panel of guests claiming to be the same person and try to figure out who is the real deal. In Britain, production house Endemol — of “Big Brother” fame — is remaking “Stars in Their Eyes,” a British talent show in which players impersonate singers.

“In the past few years there’s been a trend to look to the past and there’s a nostalgia for some of the shows from our childhood,” said David Flynn, chief creative officer at Endemol UK. “The trick is how to keep that real warmth while making sure it’s updated for new audiences.”

Game shows, Flynn said, are the one TV format that brings a loyal audience every day at the same time, whereas dramas may end after a season and typically don’t run for more than a few weeks at a time. “Every channel needs game shows to keep audiences up. Most of TV is very risky, but when you get a game show right and working, you can come back again and again to it.”

‘Fresh coat of paint’

Still, the format needs to be reinvented and refreshed every once in a while, said Ed Barton, a TV analyst at market researcher Ovum in London.

“Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?” revitalized the genre in 1998 with big money — the chance to be an instant millionaire and no chance of going home with laundry detergent or a barbecue grill. The British program has been remade in 83 different languages in 120 territories and inspired the film “Slumdog Millionaire,” which won the 2009 Oscar for best picture.

In the past five years, British broadcaster ITV Plc revived games shows including “Catchphrase,” “Through the Keyhole” and “Celebrity Squares,” said Elaine Bedell, the network’s director of entertainment and comedy. Come January, it will air “Stars in Their Eyes.”

“Whether we can bring a fresh approach is what we look for,” Bedell said. “We want to bring it back and give it something new: a fresh coat of paint that will appeal to viewers that never knew it.”

The evolution of game formats is also evident in reality shows like “Survivor” and “Big Brother,” in which participants are motivated by winning.

The decades-long success of productions such as “Family Feud,” in which family teams compete to name the most popular responses to polls on topics like “Name a word people yell at a dog” or “Name a state that gets a lot of snow” are based on a theme of simplicity to appeal to the widest audience, and are laced with humor from the host.

About 5 million households tuned into “Family Feud” last season, up from 2.4 million in 2010-2011, according to FremantleMedia. Now hosted by funnyman Steve Harvey, the show is ranked by TV Guide as the third best in game-show history, behind “Jeopardy!” and “Wheel of Fortune.”

“Jeopardy!,” a trivia-based game, has won 30 Emmy Awards and is the top quiz show in syndication with 25 million viewers a week, according to owner Sony Pictures.

“Because of the simplicity of the game show, they are very engaging and they travel well — they don’t get too clever with the questions,” said Howard Huntridge, a senior executive producer at FremantleMedia who helped bring “The Price is Right” to Britain in 1984.

Huntridge also worked on the British “Family Feud,” renamed “Family Fortunes” because executives thought “feud” was too hard. He remembers having to fly the huge digital answer screen used in the show to countries such as Israel and India because it was too difficult and expensive to mass-manufacture.

The TV game-show format started more than a half-century ago, a descendant from similar programs on radio. “Spelling Bee” came first, with televised broadcasts starting in Britain in 1938. “What’s My Line?” and “Name That Tune” joined a slew of shows that appeared in the ’50s as more people had the means to buy a TV set. Some, like “Twenty One” and “The $64,000 Question,” were found to be rigged, prompting a scandal that led the U.S. Congress to outlaw the practice.