It's been a while since I've mentioned the black-and-white game show reruns on GSN. Each night, they run two of them. At Midnight (my time), they air an old What's My Line? in chronological order. The one last night was from February 27, 1955 and the Mystery Guest was Portland Hoffa, spouse of panelist Fred Allen. If my notes are right, the Mystery Guest tonight should be Lily Pons, then tomorrow night is Sammy Davis Jr.
Following that, they'd been airing I've Got a Secret but they reached the end of that show's run and now they've replaced it with The Name's the Same, a Goodson-Todman panel show that ran from December 5, 1951 until October 7, 1955 without ever being as successful as the other Goodson-Todman show it was imitating, What's My Line? If you watch the reruns, you'll see its producers trying desperately to save it with a fruitless litany of rule changes, panel changes and host changes. In four years, its stewardship changed four times (Robert Q. Lewis to Dennis James to the team of Bob & Ray to Clifton Fadiman) with several "fill-in" hosts on a try-out basis).
But the big way they tried to make it work was with the increasing use of "gambits." What the heck are those?, I hear you cry. Well, you haven't been studying old bloggings on this site because I explained it long ago. Here…I'll save you the trouble of searching for the explanation. In April of '02, I wrote here…
…the panel shows — like What's My Line?, To Tell the Truth and I've Got A Secret — were never rigged in that way. There was no point to it. The appeal of those shows was in the panel's interplay, and no great sums of cash were at stake. (The most you could win on Line was something like $50 and, at times, they paid each contestant the full amount so that nobody would whine that they'd been swindled out of cash by the frequent anomalies in the gameplay.) In fact, not only did the producers not give the players the right answers, they frequently gave them the wrong ones.
The practice was called "gambitting" and it was based on the premise that a lot of the fun on such a show was in the panelists naïvely asking questions that had great, unintentional meaning. For example, questioning a man she didn't know sold beds for a living, Dorothy Kilgallen might ask, "Could Bennett Cerf and I use one of these together?" Of course, the audience would get hysterical. Those funny situations occurred naturally but, to make sure they occurred a little more often, the producers would often go to the panelists and suggest an area of errant questioning. Dorothy Kilgallen, actually, would rarely engage in it. She wasn't a comedian and was more interested in winning the game than in getting laughs. But most of the panelists — the comics, especially — would dutifully ask the lady who made girdles, "Could I use your product?" Or they'd ask a man who sold elephants, "Might I have one of these in my living room?" They didn't know what the contestant's secret was but they knew that the questioning they'd been told to pursue would get big boffs.
Once you're aware of the practice, it becomes very obvious. That's especially true on a lesser-known Goodson-Todman show that Game Show Network runs on occasion called, The Name's The Same. As this one plunged in the ratings, its staff ratcheted up the use of gambits to the point where the show really came off as phony and its panelists look almost stupid at times.
If you start watching the reruns on GSN now, you'll see it get worse and worse to the point of absurdity. They had some witty panelists on the show — at times, Abe Burrows, Meredith Willson, Bill Cullen, Carl Reiner and others who could be pretty funny. But the producers didn't want to take that chance so they increasingly planted the panelists with naïve questions that would yield outrageous juxtapositions. Something similar infests today's so-called "reality" shows. They don't trust reality to be interesting so they have to massage it a bit, creating phony situations with folks who go along with the manipulation. It's a small transgression on The Name's The Same but it gets worse and worse as the ratings go down…and I suspect it made them worse.