Crowning Moment of Awesome; Dethroning Moment of Suck

July 12, 2010 1:25 PM

On the coffee table, he's laid out the iconic name tags he and Linda were given, as well as their green seat assignments for the first of two tapings on September 22, 2008, in the Bob Barker Studio at CBS's Television City: 004 and 005 — right down in front, immediately to the left of the four podiums on Contestant's Row. He has the giant white cue card that a stagehand held up — TERRY KNIESS — because most contestants can't hear announcer Rich Fields telling them to come on down above the sound of the crowd. (Terry couldn't.) He also has the operating instructions for the Big Green Egg, "The World's Best Smoker and Grill," which Terry won with a perfect bid of $1,175 from Contestant's Row. It's by the pool out back, and Terry agrees that it's awesome. He has Linda's passport out, just in case, and their marriage certificate, dated April 7, 1972. "I know I would ask to see it," he says.

A great Esquire article about the only perfect Showcase bid in the history of The Price is Right.

—But, of course, there's more. Terry wrote a book; Ted (the guy in the audience) left a comment on a message board. (Here's what Terry [and Jodi Colteryahn] had to say about Ted.) —Also, fans at Golden-Road.net react to the article linked above.

posted by kipmanley (59 comments total)

I know Chris Jones -- he's a hell of a writer, and has been on MeFi twice previously.

In fact, any time anyone says "great Esquire article," I wonder what Chris has written this time.
posted by Shepherd at 1:39 PM on July 12, 2010 [3 favorites]

Forgive my ignorance on TPIR, but two things:

1. Do they always use the MSRP? What do you do for a travel package where the date of travel matters?

2. Do they (or did they) often repeat products? That seems surprising to me because (I imagine) much of their audience would watch the show religiously.
posted by 2bucksplus at 1:50 PM on July 12, 2010

That poor other lady, who was within 500 dollars on her showcase and got nothing.
posted by smackfu at 1:55 PM on July 12, 2010 [3 favorites]

That video is a perfect example of why Drew Carey is such a bad fit for that show. Here he's got this truly once-in-a-lifetime moment, and he does absolutely nothing with it. Couldn't have been more blase about it. If you're gonna host a game show where people are screaming and yelling about the price of Turtle Wax, you need to have some showmanship in you.
posted by jbickers at 2:00 PM on July 12, 2010 [7 favorites]

Errr didn't read the article did you jbickers?

Carey knew what was up and was assuming it wasn't going to air because someone was cheating.
posted by Potomac Avenue at 2:02 PM on July 12, 2010 [4 favorites]

And just over there, just on the other side of that curtain, was twice-perfect Terry Kniess, still dancing to the music. "I was like, Fuck this guy," Carey says. "When it came time to announce the winner, I thought, It's not airing anyway. So fuck him."

And THIS is why Drew fucking Carey will never be Bob Barker. Fucking amateur.

God, I'm such a freaking fanboy.
posted by muddgirl at 2:12 PM on July 12, 2010 [8 favorites]

Also, it sounds like The Price is Right should have hired Terry to catch Ted.
posted by muddgirl at 2:19 PM on July 12, 2010

Oh, "Price is Right". They do a live stage version in Vegas, and we went back in April. We went on a Tuesday afternoon and the crowd was about 100 years old and WAY too sober. The guy next to me got picked to play PLINKO and his wife didn't even seem to care! PLINKO! Hello???
posted by ThePinkSuperhero at 2:19 PM on July 12, 2010 [10 favorites]

That video is a perfect example of why Drew Carey is such a bad fit for that show.

From TFA:

And then Carey remembers what happened next: "Everybody thought someone had cheated. We'd just fired Roger Dobkowitz, and all the fan groups were upset about it. I thought, Fuck, they just fucking fucked us over. Somebody fucked us over. I remember asking, 'Are we ever going to air this?' And nobody could see how we could. So I thought the show was never going to air. I thought somebody had cheated us, and I thought the whole show was over. I thought they were going to shut us down, and I thought I was going to be out of a job.

I could have sworn I'd seen someone get the exact value of a show case show-down, but actually what I remember was seeing multiple $1.00 spinners in a single round. Which was also awesome.
posted by Civil_Disobedient at 2:21 PM on July 12, 2010

Am I the only one that thinks that The Price is Right is just asking, just asking for a Larry Sanders Show style send up? (Really HBO call me, it works with Gary Shandling and Jeffrey Tambor, you don't have to change a thing!)
posted by geoff. at 2:21 PM on July 12, 2010 [8 favorites]

I do trivia, and am probably a bit more hardcore about it than most people. I'm in a league, and we regularly take our team (with skillfully selected specialists and ringers) to the various regional fundraisers where they offer door prizes like a fifth of Jim Beam or a Cambridge High School Football sweatshirt.

We're in what I might term the second level of trivia geeks. To move up, we'd have to get really hardcore. Like the Flying Zupan Brothers, who have their "trivia names" embroidered on satin jackets and are sponsored by an insurance agency, or the local guy who is such an expert on trivia contests that Ken Jennings called him up and tootled around the Midwest with him while he researched Brainiac. Their basements are filled with stacks of books; they watch movies with a notebook or laptop handy to jot down details. I suppose I've been good at trivia because I also read a lot and retain facts easily, but with few exceptions I don't generally read to win.

Don't get me wrong; they're great guys, and they deserve their success. That's their hobby, like mine is knitting, and they're good at it. But really? When you get to that level -- the Ted level, where you're playing a whole different game than everyone else -- it ceases to be quite as fun for the rest of us.

Of course, when you actually beat them...

(And now, a reminder to look for my chapter in MeFi's own upcoming Fixed That For You: "Secrets of Kicking Ass on Jeopardy That Totally Ruin It For Everyone Else!")
posted by Madamina at 2:21 PM on July 12, 2010 [3 favorites]

Metafilter: Fuck, they just fucking fucked us over. Somebody fucked us over.
posted by 2bucksplus at 2:23 PM on July 12, 2010

After reading the article I kinda liked this Terry Kniess and was willing to see his side of the story. Then I read the linked page of his book where he refers to "Holly Holstrom".

IT'S "HOLLY HALLSTROM" FOR GOD'S SAKE YOU INSULTING SWINE! BEGONE AND NEVER DARKEN MY TV AGAIN!

And yes she is the hottie
posted by scrowdid at 2:26 PM on July 12, 2010

"That video is a perfect example of why Drew Carey is such a bad fit for that show. Here he's got this truly once-in-a-lifetime moment, and he does absolutely nothing with it. Couldn't have been more blase about it. If you're gonna host a game show where people are screaming and yelling about the price of Turtle Wax, you need to have some showmanship in you."

Swiss should understand this.
posted by mr_crash_davis mark II: Jazz Odyssey at 2:26 PM on July 12, 2010

When I was on my high school Quiz Bowl team, we memorized Trivial Pursuit cards, knowing that a good 5% of questions would just be slightly re-worded. (There's nothing more satisfying than buzzing in with the right answer after only a few words. My personal best: "A loosely-organized...") We did quite good on straight trivia but unfortunately froze up on the more mathy questions. I guess that's what happens when the team is coached by a history teacher, and when it is recruited primarily from the social studies department.
posted by muddgirl at 2:31 PM on July 12, 2010 [1 favorite]

Coming this fall: Ocean's Fourteen: The Price is Slighted
posted by The Winsome Parker Lewis at 2:32 PM on July 12, 2010

I love the last paragraph for some reason.
posted by JHarris at 2:33 PM on July 12, 2010 [1 favorite]

Also, I call bullshit, because if you got married on April 7, 1972, and you need a three-digit number, you're going to pick 472, not fucking 743 by doing the month and day backwards (sorry Brits) and ever-so-jauntily tacking on the integer corresponding to your wife's birth month. That's the most contrived contrivance I've ever heard anyone contrive.

Shove it up your butthole, Terry Kniess. Shove it up your butthole in one (or two).
posted by scrowdid at 2:36 PM on July 12, 2010 [1 favorite]

The immediate someone-cheated reaction seems odd.

For as long as the show has been on, all the showcases, it didn't come as a surprise to learn that some people got damned serious about learning prices and that someone (regardless of circumstances involving luck or otherwise) came up with the exact value of a showcase.
posted by ambient2 at 2:36 PM on July 12, 2010

I don't get the anger, scrowdid - are you angry that he lied?

Even if he was getting the numbers from Ted, rather than from his own head, I don't see any evidence of cheating. It is perfectly acceptable to listen to/watch the audience for help on the Showcase, and every other part of the show.
posted by muddgirl at 2:44 PM on July 12, 2010 [4 favorites]

You're right, that is a great article. I love journalism like that. Makes me think of my favorite-ever writer for Esquire, the great Gay Talese.

Also, I've seen about a thousand episodes of The Price is Right because my grandparents watch it religiously, so if I go visit them, I have to watch The Price is Right with them.

I would be terrible at that show because living in another country for a while got me used to a different currency, so my sense of the dollar is fucked. Weird, that.

Oh, and anyone who liked this article would love the film Quiz Show.
posted by Put the kettle on at 2:48 PM on July 12, 2010 [1 favorite]

This is eerily weird. 24hrs x 7 days = 168 hours.
911-168=743
September 11 - 24/7 = 743!

QED

I mean... What are the chances, really?
posted by yeti at 2:58 PM on July 12, 2010 [3 favorites]

There was talk that they were making a movie about Michael Larson, the guy who killed Press Your Luck so hard he left little pieces of Press Your Luck all over the floor, but I haven't heard anything about it for awhile.
posted by roll truck roll at 3:11 PM on July 12, 2010

This is fantastic.

My mom was a freak for The Price Is Right. Before she and my dad bought their little shop and she had to go to work, she'd watch it every day. I remember watching with her on school breaks. She knew all the games intimately and murmured her bids to the TV, shaking her head when the contestant foolishly overbid on the showcase or made some other fatal error that she would never, never have made. She was very smug about how good she was at it.

The funny thing is, I can only remember a handful of trips to Safeway or Giant in all of my childhood; we almost exclusively ate Korean food made with groceries from the Korean Korner or H-Mart. My mother's grasp of English has never grown past "tenuous". We were pretty poor then - there was barely room in the budget for immunizations, much less any kind of new and shiny consumer good. I have no idea how she would have known the price of a box of Stouffer's or of a fancy microwave. I kind of doubt my mother knows what half the products, especially food products, she was so good at guessing the price of are actually for.

She's a stone-cold haggler, though, and unbelievably thrifty. Paying more than she thinks something is worth is not an option to her. Maybe it's some kind of innate talent, like perfect pitch or eidetic memory.

Anyway, I love TPIR, and I liked this article a lot - I'm thinking I should call my mom, though. She keeps track of things, you know.
posted by peachfuzz at 3:20 PM on July 12, 2010 [12 favorites]

Years ago I worked at a job I hated in an office located in a very sketchy neighborhood. Because I was the newest employee I had to take my lunch at 11AM, and the only "restaurant" within reasonable driving distance was a hole-in-the-wall bar in Hamtramck that served incredible burgers and cheap drinks. Apparently 11AM was the regular lunch hour for the Chrysler Poletown plant, because the place was filled with Chrysler "shoprats" and each and every one of them was glued to the various TVs positioned in the bar which were tuned to The Price is Right. I am not exaggerating - these guys knew their prices almost as well as Ted the Audience Guy. And they very vocally and profanely yelled (often in unison) at "dumb (many descriptive expletives)" contestants onscreen who didn't know that that Broyhill living room furniture set cost $XXX. And when the MSRP was revealed, they were always within $20 of it. Each price reveal was met with table-poundings and exclamations of "damn, I should've been onstage for that!" So there are seriously rabid TPIR fans out there who absorb the basic prize prices just by virtue of repeated viewings, so it wouldn't surprise me that someone who has actually been studying the show with a VCR could hit a showcase on the nose.
posted by Oriole Adams at 3:28 PM on July 12, 2010 [7 favorites]

There was talk that they were making a movie about Michael Larson, the guy who killed Press Your Luck so hard he left little pieces of Press Your Luck all over the floor, but I haven't heard anything about it for awhile.

That's been in development hell for a long time; the people with the rights want Bill Murray for the part, and I think he'd be a perfect fit. Then again, I want Bill Murray to be in every movie.
posted by EmGeeJay at 3:47 PM on July 12, 2010 [3 favorites]

There are definitely tons of people out there who know the prices, it just always amazes me how rarely those people actually make it onto the stage; it isn't weird that this happened, to me, it's weird that most people on stage are actually guessing.
posted by paisley henosis at 3:49 PM on July 12, 2010

Very interesting. Reminds me of the story about Michael Larson, who memorized the patterns in the "Press Your Luck" game show and ended up winning over $100,000 . Here's the video of it and here is his Wikipedia entry.
posted by dealing away at 3:58 PM on July 12, 2010 [1 favorite]

Errr didn't read the article did you jbickers?

Carey knew what was up and was assuming it wasn't going to air because someone was cheating.

Yeah, and that's precisely what I mean about him missing the opportunity. Cheating or not, he should have known what great television he was in the middle of. He'll, it's better television if the guy is cheating, because then the story is even bigger and they could have milked it for weeks.

But he just kinda stands there like he wishes he was anywhere else, which is basically how he hosts the show everyday.
posted by jbickers at 4:15 PM on July 12, 2010 [2 favorites]

I never thought TPIR was rigged until I saw the million dollar salute to the armed forces in prime time and the guy won the million dollars. It seemed to perfect to be true. Of course then two other guys won a million dollars on the showcases as well. I understand there's some probability here but it always seemed to me that it was a ratings stunt.
posted by thorny at 4:21 PM on July 12, 2010

Just to back up jbickers a bit..Carey wasn't being paid to THINK he was getting paid to ENTERTAIN. So unless he had a bug in his ear telling him to wind it down, which isn't his story, then he totally effed it up. FIRED!
posted by snsranch at 4:31 PM on July 12, 2010

omg i would watch the HELL out of a price is right send up with shandling, tambor and torn
posted by DU at 4:42 PM on July 12, 2010

The producers no longer rely on Campbell's Cream of Mushroom soup; now they have different soups. They have different everything. They've built more luck into the games, dumb luck, and they've started doing sneaky things like changing the options on the cars — adding floor mats, taking away the stereo system — to mess with the prices. And they've started adding more luxury items, like Burberry coats, the sorts of things for which ordinary people who have lived their ordinary lives would never have clipped a coupon.

I don't see why this would be necessary. Couldn't they just stop recycling prizes, so that each prize only appears once?
posted by Afroblanco at 4:58 PM on July 12, 2010 [1 favorite]

Previously....
posted by ahughey at 5:08 PM on July 12, 2010 [1 favorite]

If two thousand contestants can get within a thousand dollars of the showcase, then one of them should be right on the nose.
posted by l33tpolicywonk at 5:09 PM on July 12, 2010 [2 favorites]

Couldn't they just stop recycling prizes, so that each prize only appears once?

Sure, but the prizes are advertisements. Who wants to hear: "Yes, we'll say the name of your product and have a young thin woman hold the product up and smile. BUT ONLY ONCE AND THEN NEVER AGAIN."
posted by 23skidoo at 5:37 PM on July 12, 2010

I liked Whose Line is it anyway and the Drew Carey Show. But Bob Barker is The Price is Right, in exactly the same way that Drew Carey is not.
posted by EmGeeJay at 5:56 PM on July 12, 2010

Should have previewed that one. I always sound angrier when I accidentally italicizes the whole second half of my posts.

"I am mad. Mad about game shows."
posted by EmGeeJay at 5:58 PM on July 12, 2010 [9 favorites]

Jbickers, I'd be willing to bet my showcase showdown that you typed that last comment on your iPhone.
posted by Doublewhiskeycokenoice at 6:19 PM on July 12, 2010 [1 favorite]

I liked Whose Line is it anyway and the Drew Carey Show. But Bob Barker is The Price is Right, in exactly the same way that Drew Carey is not.

The Price is Right : Bob Barker :: Whose Line is it Anyway? : Clive Anderson

I really liked The Drew Carey Show, but seriously, the guy is utter crap as a host.
posted by Sys Rq at 6:34 PM on July 12, 2010 [3 favorites]

If you think about it, the only reason this doesn't happen more often is that people tend to guess round numbers. It's like how some people would be surprised to be told there's someone out there with the exact same number of hairs on their head as they have on their own.

A show that airs every weekday for decades, and guesses that with any reasonableness will fall within some standard deviation of, what $1500? $2000? I'm not sure what the distribution of guesses is, or whether it's narrowed considerably in the age of VCRs, then the Internet and DVRs, but if it's in the low few thousands you'd expect a perfect guess every decade or so. If skill/knowledge/repeatability has an effect the guess range should be getting as low as into the hundreds of dollars (the other contestant was what, $500 off).

Given how many people study this apparently, it's sheer luck on the part of TPIR that nearly every contestant isn't an expert on prices, and thus having showcases where people routinely get within $500. If the average guess was ranging under $1000 +/-, you'd expect a perfect guess every 4 years or so.
posted by hincandenza at 6:49 PM on July 12, 2010

There was talk that they were making a movie about Michael Larson, the guy who killed Press Your Luck so hard he left little pieces of Press Your Luck all over the floor, but I haven't heard anything about it for awhile.

The Press Your Luck thing was just waiting to happen. I remember watching the show with Mom some days, and seeing the board flash around. I could see the patterns then, and I was only like 15 or so. Each screen flips through the same prizes in the same order, and the frame flips around the board according to the same pattern.

I was programming on the Commodore 64 around that time and knew about pseudo-random number generation. How, if you give it a good enough random seed, it was so random that you couldn't guess what the numbers would be, but if you didn't seed it the numbers would be the same every time. I figured, hey, I knew this basic principle of pseudo-randomness, and I'm in like tenth grade. It's a pattern, but it's so obfuscated that you'd need serious work to guess it, so it works well enough. The game show people must be smart, right? Why are they doing it this broken way, relying on the simple intersection of two easily-observable patterns, the flashing of the lights and the changing of the screens? The answer I came up with was that the frame with the monitors and the lights must be pure showmanship; when the button is pressed, surely their system must then randomly determine the position of the light and which frame was shown on the monitors randomly. The "big money no Whammy" stuff, drawing out the timing of the press, all that must logically be irrelevant; the results of the spin were probably determined long before the actual press.

I was thus quite surprised, when I found out about Larson's feat many years later, to find out that the board and the timing of the buzzer was accurate and as-depicted. It was one of those cases where the world turned out to be stupider than expected, although I suppose it is nice that there was some way in which the contestant's actual press determined the result of the spin.
posted by JHarris at 7:59 PM on July 12, 2010 [7 favorites]

muddgirl, did you ever see "Starter for 10"?
posted by Nabubrush at 8:08 PM on July 12, 2010

Every time I see Carey on TPIR he looks like he'd rather be gouging out his own eyes with a bottle opener. He actually manages to make the show depressing.
posted by Lazlo at 9:56 PM on July 12, 2010

Now I wonder if there has ever been a tie in the Showcase.
posted by ambient2 at 10:17 PM on July 12, 2010

Heh. (Don't bother watching the Plinko part.)
posted by Sys Rq at 10:27 PM on July 12, 2010 [1 favorite]

I don't have many regrets, but one of them is not going to see Bob Barker host The Price is Right when I had the chance.
posted by joedan at 11:04 PM on July 12, 2010

did you ever see "Starter for 10"?

I did, and the premise for the ending was wrong, in that it is possible to get University Challenge questions right before the question is asked, based on the category alone, given a sufficiently small category and an understanding of the general direction and difficulty of the questions being asked.
posted by biffa at 12:35 AM on July 13, 2010

Jbickers, I'd be willing to bet my showcase showdown that you typed that last comment on your iPhone.

Ohhh, you were so close! It was actually an iPad, yes, an iPad. But thanks for playing! (yodeling mountain climber falls over the edge)
posted by jbickers at 7:14 AM on July 13, 2010 [5 favorites]

I'm impressed that he got it EXACTLY right - but having watched TPIR a good bit in recent months (I was off on paternity leave with my son), I really want to punch Drew Carey in the groinal region. His little sarcastic digs at the contestants, his lack of interest in being there, it all makes the show such a DRAG. Having watched the show hundreds, maybe thousands of times over various school breaks and sick days as a kid, this makes me sad.

I used to be able to regularly guess a showcase's price to within $1000 or so, and I was VERY good at all the "guess the price of this rice-a-roni" type games, and that was with just watching the show semi-sporadically. I could easily see people getting insanely good at it, with just a little work. Luckily for TPIR, most of their audiences are filled with WOOO! college students!! Or old grannies.
posted by antifuse at 8:09 AM on July 13, 2010

You know what would be totally over the top awesome in every way known to Man and God?

The Price is Right hosted by Mr. T.
posted by ROU_Xenophobe at 8:09 AM on July 13, 2010 [3 favorites]

Fair enough, biffa - I only mentioned it because it seemed to roughly parallel muddgirl's experience. My only experience with University Challenge is the aforementioned film and The Young Ones. (For fun, Stephen Fry appears in both those UC links.)
posted by Nabubrush at 9:24 AM on July 13, 2010

Man, Starter for 10 has a combination of my two big movie pet peeves - "Mom" characters that are clearly too young to actually be The Mom, and 30-year-olds playing at being college students. It creates a cognitive dissonance where, like, Catherine Tate could be the mom of a college student, but she couldn't be the birth mother of James McAvoy, who is supposed to be a college student... It hurts my brain.
posted by muddgirl at 9:33 AM on July 13, 2010

Yay, discussion of Starter For 10! By sheer coincidence, I was re-watching it the other day. I think all three mains were reasonably mid-twenties-ish when it was filmed, though Rebecca Hall looks older than she is. I think it presents the trivia junkie mindset pretty well - there is a satisfaction in just knowing the answer to things, whether or not you know the context. It intersects really nicely with that off-to-college-I'm-the-King-of-the-World-no-wait-I'm-not period in early adulthood.

Plus...I love James McAvoy, even with that terrible hair.
posted by peachfuzz at 9:52 AM on July 13, 2010

The Price is Right hosted by Mr. T.

No, I think it would be better with Larry David as the host. You still get cash and prizes, but you'll feel pretty guilty about it.
posted by krinklyfig at 9:54 AM on July 13, 2010

OK, McAvoy was like, 26 or 27, but still. Either they cast Tate in a role for an actress 10 years older, or they cast McAvoy in a role for someone 10 years younger. Or maybe McAvoy is 5 years too old and Tate is 5 years too young.

I'm not saying it's wrong, and it's probably wide-spread - it just annoys me and unfortunately ruins otherwise-good movies (like the worst offender I can think of, Star Trek).
posted by muddgirl at 10:09 AM on July 13, 2010

Carey wasn't being paid to THINK he was getting paid to ENTERTAIN.

Seriously, I'm gonna read your entire comment history on MetaFilter. If, in those comments, you have EVER complained about the poor state of television or entertainment, I'm going to save up for the rest of my life for a fucking De Lorean and travel back in time to just before the internet starts and park outside your house and wait until you get home from school or work and give you an A4 piece of paper with a basic summary of how I came to be there and what a MetaFilter is on one side, and the above quote in 26 pt COMIC FUCKING SANS on the other. Then I'll disappear for a bit, travel around, visit the old times, make some money on sports and the stock market etc. and you'll forget all about me. Then I'll travel back to a time and date some time in the not too distant future and, with the money I've made, I'll hire Sean Kingston to follow you around singing 'Beautiful Girls' every minute you're awake. Don't think I'll do it? I already have. That loud noise you're about to hear in the next few minutes? That's me. I'm in your garage.

Also - they choose their contestants from the audience? No vetting? That's insane! Great, but insane!
posted by doublehappy at 5:01 AM on July 14, 2010 [1 favorite]

"Carey wasn't being paid to THINK he was getting paid to ENTERTAIN."

Seriously, I'm gonna read your entire comment history on MetaFilter. If, in those comments, you have EVER complained about the poor state of television or entertainment, I'm going to save up for the rest of my life for a fucking De Lorean and travel back in time to just before the internet starts and park outside your house and wait until you get home from school or work and give you an A4 piece of paper with a basic summary of how I came to be there and what a MetaFilter is on one side, and the above quote in 26 pt COMIC FUCKING SANS on the other. Then I'll disappear for a bit, travel around, visit the old times, make some money on sports and the stock market etc. and you'll forget all about me. Then I'll travel back to a time and date some time in the not too distant future and, with the money I've made, I'll hire Sean Kingston to follow you around singing 'Beautiful Girls' every minute you're awake.

This seems, to me, an overreaction.
posted by EmGeeJay at 2:53 PM on July 14, 2010

If anybody's still following this thread, the Press Your Luck winner is the subject of this week's This American Life.
posted by l33tpolicywonk at 5:05 PM on July 18, 2010