TV Revives the Darndest Things

Wrestling. Prime-time quiz shows. Weekly amateur hours. “The Wonderful World of Disney.” Concerned young doctors. Picking out some regular woman and making her dreams come true.

The millennium may be drawing toward its conclusion, but television programmers appear headed back to the future, turning to shows and formats recalling the medium’s infancy in the 1950s.

ABC’s success with “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire”--which heralded the quiz show’s return to prime time in a big way during August--has only fueled the sense you can go home again, plucking concepts from TV’s past and recycling old ideas in slick new packages.

“Millionaire” has left every programmer wanting its own prime-time quiz show, with NBC developing a revival of “Twenty-One”--notorious for spawning the quiz-show scandals of the ‘50s--while CBS toys with an updated version of “The $64,000 Question.” Fox weighs in with its own hastily assembled entry, “Greed,” next month. With a few short-lived exceptions, such fare hasn’t visited prime time in decades.

Still, that’s just the tip of the iceberg. CBS’ Friday lineup includes “Kids Say the Darndest Things”--derived from a segment on the ‘50s Art Linkletter series “House Party.” Its running mate last season, the 50-year-old “Candid Camera,” is waiting in the wings for a return engagement.

Wrestling is back on network television--that is, if you count UPN as a network--and practically ubiquitous on cable, where a half-dozen of the Top 10 most-watched programs usually involve body-slamming and eye-gouging. Forget “The Sopranos.” If you want a big cable audience, find a modern-day Freddie Blassie and John “The Golden Greek” Tolos and have them start throwing people off the ropes.

“The Wonderful World of Disney” is also playing on ABC again, and while it bears little resemblance to “Disneyland”--the 1954 series ABC founder Leonard Goldenson hatched with Walt Disney to find programming for the nascent network--both serve the same purpose, providing a weekly commercial for the studio and its theme parks.

*

Daytime’s top-rated game show, “The Price Is Right,” premiered in 1957 and is still going strong. Even what might be called the “agony shows” of the 1950s, such as “Queen for a Day,” have made something of a comeback. Beyond the talk shows and court shows that document stories of human suffering, there’s now a daily program, “Richard Simmons’ Dream Maker,” in which the diet guru picks out regular Joes and Josephines and attempts to answer their prayers.

And while not quite “The Original Amateur Hour,” which ran from 1948 to 1970 (the last decade as a daytime show), or “Arthur Godfrey’s Talent Scouts” (the top-rated show of the 1951-52 season), “Your Big Break” captures some of that spirit with a karaoke twist--bringing in amateurs and letting them impersonate favorite singers in front of an audience, all in pursuit of stardom, fabulous prizes and, at minimum, a few of those 15 minutes of fame Andy Warhol talked about everyone getting sooner or later.

“When I first saw it, I said, ‘This is so old it’s new again,’ ” notes “Big Break” producer Dick Clark, who based the show on a European format and knows a little something about sipping from the Fountain of Youth.

Dramatic productions have also picked up this theme. NBC is airing a movie tonight starring Judd Nelson as Alan Freed--the disc jockey credited with helping popularize rock ‘n’ roll--and even next month’s rating sweeps will have a decidedly ‘50s flavor. In addition to the return of “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire”--which ABC will run for 15 consecutive nights starting Nov. 7--”The Drew Carey Show” will seek to recapture an “anything can happen” flair by presenting a live episode.

CBS’ lineup, meanwhile, will include “Shake, Rattle & Roll,” a four-hour miniseries set against the birth of rock ‘n’ roll that not only features nostalgic music but also cameo appearances by such icons as Troy Donahue, Edd “Kookie” Byrnes and “Father Knows Best’s” Elinor Donahue. To which the audience watching the WB network is no doubt collectively muttering, “Who?”

Several factors may be responsible for this mini-renaissance, from a dearth of new ideas to a hunger for affordable yet recognizable concepts to fill channels that keep sprouting up like weeds.

Yet the notion of reviving ‘50s formats also seems somewhat incongruous with TV’s emphasis on youth; after all, most of those in the 18-to-49 age demographic--the principal currency of network sales departments--weren’t born or were barely cognizant when the ‘50s progenitors of these shows were in their original glory days.

Robert Thompson, director of the Center for the Study of Popular Television at Syracuse University, chalks it up in large part to a need for cheap programming as channels proliferate, cutting into network audiences while giving birth to cable entities that also place a premium on keeping costs down.

“As the industry is scouring history to find what worked in the past . . . it was inevitable they would stumble across a lot of different things,” Thompson says. “The wine has re-aged. The big surprise is why it took as long as it did. If we were susceptible to this 40 years ago, why wouldn’t we be now?”

Author David Halberstam, who wrote the decade-spanning history “The Fifties,” also attributes the resurgence to modern television economics rather than any attempt to recapture that era.

“I would not make a generational parallel,” he says. “It’s more like a swing of the pendulum: Something’s in, something’s out. There’s a great instinct for escapism in television. I don’t see any larger truth in it.”

*

While seemingly raiding America’s past, “Millionaire” hews closely to a British series that has been wildly successful in the United Kingdom. Some of the new programs bear no more resemblance to their predecessors than “ER” does to “Dr. Kildare,” which began making the rounds in 1961. Thompson points out that updated versions of old standbys tend to be infused with a different sensibility, “just dripping with ‘90s American irony.”

Clark--whose “American Bandstand” made its debut in 1952--suggests certain ideas remain timeless, and that the entertainment industry’s emphasis on youth means that network executives in a position to approve projects often come to the table with little sense of their history.

“We sell to people who weren’t born then, so they think it’s new,” Clark says. “Theoretically, the man or woman you’re pitching is a student of television or has read about it. The average viewer [in that age group] doesn’t even have that knowledge.”

A program’s description can also suggest a bond with an older premise that might not necessarily exist. While “Richard Simmons’ Dream Maker” may sound like “Queen for a Day,” Dick Askin--president of Tribune Entertainment, which is distributing the syndicated program to TV stations--says that earlier series only came up during the show’s development as something the producers wanted to avoid. “Whoever’s story was the saddest was the one who walked away with the dishwasher,” Askin says.

By contrast, “Dream Maker” doesn’t contain that competitive element. Askin characterizes the show less as a throwback than a reaction to the mud-slinging that currently occurs elsewhere in daytime television.

“The participants go away better off than they were before the show, which is the antithesis of most of these shows,” Askin says. “It is positive in an environment where there really isn’t that much populist programming being put forth.”

Showcasing ordinary people in unusual circumstances is a recurring theme in many of these programs--one Linkletter pioneered on “People Are Funny” and “House Party,” which relied on the host’s ability to interact with his audience. The late Allen Funt mined a similar vein with the original “Candid Camera,” passing that baton to his son, Peter, who produces the existing CBS incarnation.

“It was surprising in the early days, and still is, the idea of ordinary people getting their 15 minutes of fame,” says Linkletter, now 87, who remains active, touring the country as a lecturer.

“This has become a staple because the shows are cheap to produce. They’re just dressed up, and there’s much more money. Everything is more elaborate. This is going to go on. It’ll never end as long as there’s excitement, uncertainty and big prizes.”

Syndication companies--whose programs play at different times of day depending on the city--naturally look for a series “that’s easy to understand and can run in a lot of different places,” says Mort Marcus, president of Buena Vista Television, the Disney division behind “Your Big Break” and responsible for helping bring “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire” to the U.S.

Though a slew of quiz shows are already in the works, Marcus maintains it’s always best to be out in front in these kinds of races.

“History says that the first one in is the big winner,” he says. “The next guy in is not as interesting.”

In fact, executive producer Michael Davies suggests those hoping to tap into the same well from which “Millionaire” drew viewers might be misguided in assuming the program’s high summer ratings are evidence of a renewed interest in the quiz or game show genre.

“ ‘Millionaire’ doesn’t work because it’s a game show,” he says. “It works on a very human level. . . . In some ways, it’s a drama.”

The show does seem to share a bond with a memorable drama anthology of the ‘50s, “The Millionaire,” which also capitalized on the enduring allure of getting rich quick--in this case, having some individual presented $1 million tax-free by an eccentric billionaire, exploring how such sudden wealth would alter the recipient’s life.

Yet if “Millionaire” contains similar elements, it can deliver them at significantly lower rates than those normally associated with amassing vast prime-time audiences--a true bargain relative to the millions spent pounding out episodes of “ER” or “Touched by an Angel.”

Lower ratings expectations at the major networks have made any program capable of attracting a reasonable share of the audience viable, assuming it’s not too expensive. Game shows, then, don’t have to generate the sort of widespread enthusiasm they achieved in the ‘50s--when “The $64,000 Question” topped the ratings--to quickly repopulate prime time.

Despite that logic, some within the industry caution against putting too much emphasis on economics if it comes at the expense of satisfying viewers. “The audience doesn’t care what it costs,” Marcus notes. “They only care if they like it.”

*

Admittedly, any discussion of reviving ‘50s fare would be incomplete if it omitted what was on then that’s not found on the dial today.

The western, which filled the airwaves that decade with dozens of gunslingers, has been almost entirely swept from prime time, due in part to high production costs. TNT may churn out periodic western-themed movies, but there are no network series along those lines, with CBS’ “Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman” and “The Magnificent Seven” among the recent casualties.

In addition, Linkletter cites the disappearance of the network variety show. The form has experienced a minor renewal in cable, but it’s in far different surroundings than Ed Sullivan could have imagined. Recent variations--all done for budget-minded cable networks, and little-seen even by their ratings standards--include USA’s “Happy Hour,” featuring the Zappa brothers, and FX’s tandem of “Penn & Teller’s Sin City Spectacular” and “Bobcat’s Big Ass Show.”

Linkletter isn’t especially thrilled with all the new wrinkles on evergreen formats, seeing “Jerry Springer” as a distasteful if understandable case study for why the modern “agony” show has flourished. “If you get 30 million perverts who like to see dysfunctional people expose their genitals, then he’s going to get a hell of a rating,” he muses.

Linkletter also contends that for all its excesses, U.S. television lags behind other countries that have taken putting regular people in odd situations as entertainment and gone beyond what’s generally accepted here.

Japanese TV, for example, features certain shows that subject people to dangerous or humiliating ordeals in pursuit of cash and prizes. ABC tried its own milder version--a short-lived series called “The Big Moment”--and Linkletter hesitates to guess where future variations on those old themes will ultimately lead.

“They have people sit on ice for 15 hours or run through fire, which we don’t do,” he says. “But that’s coming.”