He’s America’s Dealer of Choice
The search for the meaning of “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire,” like the search for the meaning of life, leads to surprising places. It leads, for instance, to a Gamblers Anonymous meeting at Desert Hospital in Palm Springs. Here, as they do every Friday night, about two dozen compulsive gamblers gather to face their demons, to share tales of financial ruin and families torn apart. It’s a comforting, ritualized exercise that keeps them from all the temptations out there--race tracks, card clubs, casinos.
But Tom Tucker, executive director of the California Council on Problem Gambling, himself a gambler in recovery, kicked off the meeting by referring to a new kind of temptation: Does anyone here watch “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire”? he asked. And does it make you want to gamble?
It was a planted question. I had been invited into this particular meeting, chasing a ghost: I was looking for a person who can’t watch “Millionaire,” as opposed to the average 28 million who can and do (to say nothing of the 36 million who tuned in for the show’s recent run of celebrity contestants). In the TV business, “Millionaire” has been called many things--a juggernaut, a drug, a phenomenon, a disease--but these are mostly the metaphors of its enemies, and none explains why we keep watching, at such astonishing rates. The show’s 28 million viewers--in TV terms an estimate from Nielsen Media Research--also stack up this way, based on 1999 statistics: “Millionaire” is watched by roughly the same number of children who are fed by the federal school lunch and breakfast programs. A single night of “Millionaire” draws the same number of people who pass through Logan Airport in Boston in an entire year.
Perhaps the riddle of “Millionaire,” then, is better put this way: Are we sick, as a nation, for staying with this show so devotedly, zombie pawns in yet another marketing scheme perpetrated by the evil geniuses at the Walt Disney Co.? Or are we just having fun?
Maybe I was the sick one, fighting Friday afternoon traffic from Los Angeles to Palm Springs, burning gas into the ecosystem, all in the interest of a half-baked theory--that the secret of “Millionaire’s” success, the reason it retains such a superhuman hold on the public’s attention, lies in the canny ways the show apes the adrenaline-pumping escape of casino gambling. You can see it in the vibrant surreality of the show’s lighting and set design, in its series of teases and tensions: Play here and you will become rich. As in blackjack, “Millionaire” allows its players to see their hands before upping the ante. As in blackjack, the player contemplates his odds and consults his superstitions. But in “Millionaire” you must bet more to win more. Sure, you can cut and run if you think that’s best (wimp). In the meantime, think about it. Take your time.
It is here that Regis Philbin, the show’s host, earns his salary. A Gallup Poll released in January found that more people can identify Philbin as host of “Millionaire” than Jay Leno as host of “The Tonight Show.” Regis is smooth, with those steely ties that look like they could hurt you, but he’s more than a host. He’s a facilitator of dreams, to the best of his ability. In the circumscribed tension of the show, with so much money on the line, he can become father confessor or therapist. Share your thoughts, Reege encourages. Yes, that $64,000 sure could come in handy. Absolutely, Reege assures, no shame in taking the $64,000 and bailing. On the other hand, why not go for it? You’ve polled the audience, you’ve phoned a friend, you’ve used up your 50-50. No more lifelines left. It’s just you and your gut and the following question: “When am I ever going to get this close to $1 million again?”
In the parlance of the gambler, this is the show’s “action,” the way it trades on the excitement and even euphoria of the high-stakes wager. When Philbin calls out “final answer,” he could as easily be saying, “Place your bets.” Seen in this context, “Millionaire” isn’t just a benign trivia game or game-show genre stimulator. It’s a form of recreational gambling, an intricate, hyper-stylized casino game beamed into America’s living rooms. And what it tells us is very, very true: Gambling is fun. A horribly self-destructive activity if it gets out of control, yes. But in the meantime fun. Fun, fun, fun.
“You have to take into account the pleasure of playing,” says Frederick Barthelme, novelist and director of the writing program at the University of Southern Mississippi in Hattiesburg. Barthelme, with brother Steven, is the co-author of the 1999 memoir “Double Down: Reflections on Gambling and Loss,” in which the two brothers chronicle their slow slide into gambling, a habit fueled by the loss of their parents, who died within 16 months of each other. The Barthelmes grieved but they also gambled, and gambled hungrily and at times happily, driving 65 miles from Hattiesburg to the offshore casinos of Gulfport and Biloxi, where they eventually squandered more than $250,000 of their newly acquired family inheritance. And yet, “Double Down” isn’t just a cautionary tale, written by two reformers with a tale of woe. It’s a story of two men who fully understood the richness, the joy, of the game they were playing.
“You win money and you want to play more. You lose money and you want to play more,” Frederick Barthelme says now. “The point is to stay in the game. When those guys on ‘Millionaire’ get a question at like, $125,000, and then they back out, it’s always a little bit depressing. Although it’s reassuring from the point of view of a former gambler, that ability to cut and run when there’s time.”
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It was a sentiment echoed at the Gamblers Anonymous meeting in Palm Springs. “I know why I like [contestants] to go for it, because I was a jackpot bettor,” said Fern Jacobs, a student at College of the Desert. At the time of the interview, Jacobs was 12 days removed from her last bet. Yes, she said, she watches “Millionaire” with regularity, and she knows why: It is exciting to watch people “go for it.”
“Tom B.,” on the other hand, a landscaper from Banning and recovering gambler going on two years, can’t watch the show. He also tries to stay away from “Greed,” “Twenty One,” “Wheel of Fortune”--where money and big giveaways are fetishized, held up as keys to the kingdom of happiness.
“The other night on ‘Wheel of Fortune’ someone won a Toyota 4Runner and it gave me the same feeling I had when I won $10,000 on a keno machine at Morongo [Indian casino],” he said.
For compulsive gamblers, in fact, even trying to qualify as a game-show contestant can be considered a relapse. The rest of us, of course, play along with considerable pleasure. Indeed, inherent in the title of “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire” is the rhetorical reply: “Who doesn’t?” To see the parade of average white guys on the show is to sense that “Millionaire” presents to them a more attainable vision of wealth than working one’s entire life.
As such, social critics tend to take a dimmer view of “Millionaire’s” implications. The show, they say, reflects the current premium on getting rich quickly, the spiritually empty drive for overnight wealth, evidence of which can be seen in the nationwide growth of lottery games, in Internet gambling (an estimated 14.5 million people gamble online), in the fact that Las Vegas is the fastest-growing city in the country.
Even Alex Trebek, host of “Jeopardy!,” a quaint little quiz show compared to “Millionaire,” grew philosophical in explaining “Millionaire’s” success: “We’re in an upswing time, in which almost everybody can be a millionaire by shrewd investing in the stock market,” Trebek told the Washington Post recently. “I just think people want to be a part of the surge and enjoy this affluent period.”
Failing IPO riches, people just want to be around money, to get a whiff of it. Go to a taping, for instance, of Big Spin 2000, the California Lottery show that tapes monthly at a KCET studio in Hollywood. The bleachers, as you might expect, are filled with people who’ve qualified to play various big-money games. Family members are there in support.
But scattered throughout are also people who have no affiliation with the proceedings, save for a general desire to be in the presence of money, to witness strangers winning big, to be in the room. This is why Fred and Maria Brown, for instance, had come with their two children. It was their form of recreation on a Sunday afternoon.
“You kind of live vicariously through other people,” Maria said, asked of the lottery’s appeal as spectator sport. “Everybody’s like you, but then they become rich.”
Everybody’s like you, but then they become rich--it seems an appropriate enough tag line for “Millionaire,” as succinct a way as any to sum up its universal appeal.
“We’re hearing about stock market millionaires every day. We’re seeing ballplayers and other athletes getting huge contracts. We have lottery jackpots, and now we have these game-show contestants,” says James Smith, a Penn State University professor who teaches an American studies course on gambling and American culture.
“Millionaire” seems “like one more lottery ticket,” adds Robert Frank, professor of economics at Cornell’s Johnson Graduate School of Management and the author of “Luxury Fever: Why Money Fails to Satisfy in an Era of Excess.” Among the trends Frank noted in that book: That in the last 25 years “the lion’s share of wealth gains have gone to the top 20%” of Americans; the rich are not only getting richer, the rest of us are trying like mad to keep up. One in 68 families filed for bankruptcy last year, quadrupling the number of families who filed in the early 1980s, Frank says.
“There are lots of reasons to wish you had more money now,” he says. “And the usual ways of getting it aren’t fun.”
There’s that word again, “fun.” “Millionaire” is fun. But would it be equally compelling without the prospect of life-altering riches?
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Yes, argue those who produce it, and the ABC executives carpet-bombing the show across the prime-time schedule with the announcement last week that ABC will air “Millionaire” four nights a week in the fall. It’s the drama, stupid, they say, the spectacle of ordinary people put in an extraordinary circumstance.
“It’s not what you give away, or how much you give away, it’s the way you give it away,” agrees Steve Beverly, who teaches broadcasting at Union University in Jackson, Tenn., and also operates a Web site called the Game Show Convention Center. “On lottery shows, it’s one spin of the wheel and that’s that. Here you have the same high drama and suspense you see in some of the drama shows.”
“A guy’s playing for $100 and yet there’s drama,” adds longtime game-show producer Jonathan Goodson. “My theory has always been that big money will get people’s attention and it ends after that, unless the show is intrinsically entertaining.”
Goodson, son of the genre’s legendary Mark Goodson, producer of such game shows as “Match Game” and “Family Feud,” says “Millionaire” is what insiders in the game-show industry refer to as a “pig show”--shorthand for a show featuring a push-pull between danger and payoff, “where you’re tempted to win more money but you could also lose a lot.” In another era, “Jokers Wild” was a pig show. And now “Millionaire” is the pig show to end all pig shows.
In Britain, where “Millionaire” was conceived, the show had an intriguing working title: “Cash Mountain” (because aren’t we all, like Sisyphus, pushing our own boulders up our own cash mountains?). Three years later, Celador, the company that produces a wide range of British TV shows, is sitting on a licensing gold mine; to date, “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire” airs in 22 countries, including Poland, and has been licensed to 77 overall, says Adrian Woolfe, Celador’s head of marketing. Licensees don’t just rent the title, they’re handed a 160-page show bible, Woolfe says, detailing the show’s carefully strategized look. Lights are to grow progressively dimmer as the contestant works his way toward the million, and theme music is to increase a semitone after each round as well, all designed to heighten the tension.
No one in England has won 1 million pounds, though one contestant took home a second prize of 500,000 pounds. The American “Millionaire,” by contrast, has already produced three big winners. This is despite the fact that far fewer “Millionaire” episodes (100) have aired in the U.S. In England, where, since debuting as event television in September 1998, the show runs in two-week bursts several times a year. Celador has produced 184 shows so far.
This disparity alarmed Goshawk Syndicate, brokers at Lloyd’s of London, who are contracted to pay out “Millionaire’s” ultimate prize in America. In February, the insurers filed suit in London’s high court, complaining in part that questions on the ABC show have been dumbed down, making the game too easy.
There has been another million-dollar winner since then, and the legal action has hardly slowed “Millionaire’s” momentum. Eighteen hours of the program ran during the May sweeps period, and millions continue to phone a 1-800 number trying to qualify.
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As anyone who has watched the show with regularity can attest, the contestants are largely white men--gainfully employed, socially functional--the Dilbert-like protagonists in the “Millionaire” universe. Celebrated for their ordinariness, the Everyman-as-TV-star is a “Millionaire” staple.
“The smartest thing they do is the amount of time they spend with each contestant, actually getting to know them,” says Jack Lechner, a film producer for Radical Media. “They’re people you don’t see on TV. They’re employed, they’re not dysfunctional.”
They’re also trivia hounds, says David Kipen, book editor at the San Francisco Chronicle. To Kipen, “Millionaire” has thrown a mirror onto “an undiagnosed subculture,” a whole subset of useless knowledge wonks, “a secret community that you do not want to play Scrabble with, or Trivial Pursuit with.”
Lechner agrees. “There are few things I can do to world-class standard, and answering trivia questions is one of them,” he says. Both men confess to spending more time than their wives would have liked phoning the 1-800 number that would-be “Millionaire” contestants must dial between the hours of 3 and 11 p.m. West Coast time. Kipen, in fact, programmed his Palm Pilot to chime daily at 3 p.m. as a Pavlovian reminder. He became a finalist but didn’t make it into the hot seat; Lechner did, bowing out at $125,000.
By then, he’d already polled the audience in correctly answering the $64,000 question, “Which one of Louisa May Alcott’s ‘Little Women’ was the oldest?” (Meg). At $125,000, he knew that Elijah was the prophet carried to heaven in a flaming chariot. The $250,000 plateau presented a sports question: A losing player in this year’s Super Bowl earned how much money?
Lechner didn’t know, and his phone-a-friend hadn’t a clue. He had one lifeline left--the 50-50, wherein two wrong answers are removed, leaving the player with an even-money shot at the right answer. If Lechner guessed wrong he would lose $93,000. Winning would mean a bump up to $250,000. Lechner knew that if he used his 50-50 lifeline he’d be too tempted not to gamble on the odds; sitting in the “Millionaire” hot seat, good sense finally prevailed. He took his $125,000 and walked away.
Was Lechner not caught up in the psychology, the thrill of gambling at that moment, even just a little?
He disagreed.
“The thrill of gambling to the gambler is that you are casting your fate to the winds, but with a pretense of control,” said Lechner, a former development executive at Miramax Films. “This is why there are so many gamblers in the film industry. Making movies, especially when you’re a buyer, is very similar. You don’t have the faintest idea what’s going to work, but you have the roulette system--market research, casting a star, making a sequel. It’s a way of fooling yourself you have control when you don’t.”
I persisted. You’re sitting in a chair, there’s $125,000 to gain, $93,000 to lose, and this isn’t high-stakes gambling? Lechner could see my point, but he insisted I was barking up the wrong tree.
“Left to my own devices, I would be a hopeless, degenerate gambler,” he said. “This was an entirely different experience.”
Perhaps, but Lechner is speaking as a player, not as a viewer. For those of us at home, “Millionaire” offers the same view one gets peering over shoulders at a roulette or blackjack or craps table, mesmerized by the soothing repetition of the little mini-dramas unfolding. “Gambling is a ritualized act,” says Penn State’s Smith. “There are stages that a gambling event goes through,” and so too does the drama on “Millionaire” offer ritualized pleasures--the dash to $1,000, the slower drive to $32,000, the struggle to $64,000 and the biblical march to the million. Four nights a week? Give me a world where “Millionaire” runs 24 hours a day, seven days a week, the action as timeless and perpetual as a casino at 3:30 in the morning, on a Tuesday. *