Female Game Show



April 14, 2001



BOB GARFIELD: Among the ways The Weakest Link breaks tradition is the very presence of a female host. The 64,000 dollar question may be why do all these game show jobs go to men? Chris Suellentrop wrote the article Classic Concentration for the on line magazine Slate.com and traced the history of female game show hosts. Chris, Anne Robinson may be one of a kind, but I gather she's not the first.

CHRIS SUELLENTROP: She is not. The Sally Ride, if you will, of game show hosts is Arlene Francis, a woman who hosted a show called Blind Date from 1949 to 1952. She was really most famous for being a panelist on What's My Line, but she did host that show for three years. You know we had--there's a lot of hosts, male hosts, that we have sort of iconic status in American culture: Bob Barker, Wink Martindale, Chuck Woolery, [sp?] Alex Trebeck, Pat Sajac -- no woman host rises to that level in our collective memory.

BOB GARFIELD: I don't know if that's a good thing or a bad thing.

CHRIS SUELLENTROP:[LAUGHS] Chuck Woolery told Newsweek in 1975: MC-ing a game show is the dream of every deejay in America, and that's who's got the job -- disk jockeys and television has-beens. But, but the question I asked is shouldn't women have the right to be TV has-beens too?

BOB GARFIELD: [LAUGHS] So Arlene Francis has a three year run. Not bad. She clearly wasn't a failure.

CHRIS SUELLENTROP: Yes.

BOB GARFIELD: How did it come to pass that so many of her successors were men?

CHRIS SUELLENTROP:That's a great question! There were a few other women in the early 50s -- the heyday of game shows when they were on prime time before the quiz show scandals. Gypsy Rose Lee actually hosted a show for, for a few months. There was a woman named Vera Vague [sp?] who hosted a couple of shows that were unsuccessful and then the game shows fell off the map, and so did women hosts. And when they came back, the people that produced these shows for this new day time audience which was a largely female audience, I think they assumed that they would want to see these toothy guy-smiley's hosting the show.

BOB GARFIELD:All right. But the game shows are no longer the province merely of daytime television. Why do the networks or the producers persist in hiring men?

CHRIS SUELLENTROP: Well one, you know, TV producers as people in most industries I think have a, have a bias for what works and what they're used to, and so that, that's part of it. In 1993 Betty White started hosting a show called Just Men. She actually won a daytime Emmy for that. And then since then there have been a handful of hosts -- more than there were in the, in the '60s and '70s which was practically zero. But women tend to host shows that are very stereotypical gender role shows. They host shows in which they're matchmakers or they're, they're cooks or they're babysitters. It's very rare for a woman to host a quiz show, which Anne Robinson is doing.

BOB GARFIELD:All right, so comes now Anne Robinson. She's busted through the gender barrier. Her persona on this show is quite aggressive. She actually will say some nasty and demeaning things to the contestants who fail. Is there any explanation for the fact that America isn't comfortable with women game show hosts, apparently, as the sort of smiley, toothy presence of authority, but seems quite comfortable with them as scolds like Dr. Laura or Judge Judy whose abrasiveness is part of their shtick?

CHRIS SUELLENTROP: That's really true. I hadn't thought about that. Women are well-ensconced on daytime television as, as you know warm, fuzzy Oprah's or Rosie's, but I suppose they're also Judge Judy's and Dr. Laura's.

BOB GARFIELD:While having a prime time game show may on the face of it be some sort of victory for women rights, it may be a dubious victory? After all? [BOTH SPEAK AT ONCE]

CHRIS SUELLENTROP: Yes. Yes. It does say something about the culture. The - but and it's good that -- I mean women used to be worse than hostesses. They used to be dancing cigarette packs or pirate girls on these game shows, and so it says quite a bit about where women have moved in the past 50 years to have a woman hosting a prime time game show!

BOB GARFIELD:Well I guess for the moment we'll just be grateful. [LAUGHTER] Thank you, Chris Suellentrop. I'm a sor--Sorry you don't win On the Media, but you do get to take home a home version of our game as well as a case of turtle wax and a 144 boxes of Lee Press-On Nails. [LAUGHTER] Chris, thanks.

CHRIS SUELLENTROP: Thank you.

BOB GARFIELD: Chris Suellentrop is an editor at Slate.com.