The Price is Right and Pure Joy
The game show demonstrates the communal nature of joy — and encourages it through material consumption.
By TIMOTHY YENTER
The Price Is Right (1956– ) is perhaps the only place on television where you can consistently find expressions of pure joy.
There was certainly a good deal of happiness in a show like Extreme Makeover: Home Edition (2003–2012), but it always required a journey through a family’s greatest sorrows. Similarly, even most of today’s sitcoms have an edge to them, so consistent delight is virtually impossible. Finally, scripted dramas can explore moments of triumph (usually after tragedy), but pure joy? Almost never.
A Rather Wonderful Thing to Watch
Game shows can fill a lot of needs in our lives, but The Price Is Right has the singular ability to demonstrate the communal nature of joy. Having your name called — Come on down! You’re the next contestant on The Price Is Right! — always leads to eager jumping, flailing, and hugging/climbing over each person in your row as you make your way down.
The Price is Right’s audience participates in a way uncommon in most game shows, shouting suggestions and cheering on friends and strangers alike. Unlike the late-2000s rash of Japanese-inspired game shows like Wipeout (2008– ) and I Survived a Japanese Game Show (2008–09), which feed off of humiliating others, The Price Is Right remains a place in which people join together in celebrating minor accomplishments.
Games shows from the 2000s inspired by the popularity of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? like The Weakest Link (2000–12) and Deal or No Deal (2005–09) also isolated the individual. It’s no surprise Regis Philbin would be the only one who looks as if he is enjoying himself on Millionaire.
Compare that to Bob Barker and Drew Carey, the least expressive hosts imaginable, rarely showing more emotion than cracking a smile — and smartly so, since any effusiveness on their parts would take the show (even further) over the top. Barker or Carey can stand while they are hugged, kissed, and nearly knocked over by excited contestants celebrating their victory or their opportunity.
The community of The Price Is Right is not just constituted by the studio audience. Viewers are drawn in by the host’s looking directly into camera and the showcase models’ exhibiting prizes for us.
Sit in a doctor’s waiting room or the holding tank at an automotive repair shop, and you’ll find that the show most likely to draw everyone’s faces toward the television is The Price Is Right.
The joy is intensely personal as we watch a person jump up and down, screaming. And it’s also communal as people cheer on their peer. It’s a rather wonderful thing to watch on TV.
And the Actual Retail Price Is…
If I am right that The Price Is Right is the rare show that allows housewives, frat boys, and retired grandparents to join together in expressions of shared joy, it is also problematic for encouraging these expressions through material consumption.
Virtually anyone in the U.S. will recognize the phrase A new car! called out in your best Rod Roddy impersonation.
The greatest expressions of joy on television are for getting a car, a boat, or a trip to the Eiffel tower, and we encourage this by watching a show whose purpose is to reward people for knowing the cost of common (and increasingly uncommon) consumer products, as this study suggests.
The two shows most like The Price Is Right are Let’s Make a Deal (aired on and off since 1963), which shares some of the community feeling but in a detached and silly way, and Supermarket Sweep (2000–03), a low-budget alternative that tries to capture some of the energy of The Price Is Right and its rewarding of pure consumerism. But neither has managed to stay on television as long nor be as successful in their runs.
The Price Is Right’s success, I think, has to do with its unique ability to showcase and encourage shared joy. Like other shows, it can test our knowledge of trivia and allow us to compare ourselves to the show’s contestants.
But unlike competition shows such as Top Chef (2006– ) or Jeopardy! (1964– ), where we can see expertise exhibited in an arena designed to pit players against one another and promote tensions, on The Price Is Right everyone is encouraged to cheerlead each other after the initial bidding.
You may not get to compete for a prize, but you are primed to cheer on those who are.
Originally published at Inessentials.
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