‘Gong Show’ creator knew large audience for lowbrow
Chuck Barris, the Gong Show creator, songwriter and novelist who sought to add to his already eclectic résumé with a madeup — or was it? — story about being a CIA assassin, died of natural causes Tuesday in Palisades, N.Y. He was 87.
In 1965, he came up with The Dating Game, in which a bachelorette or bachelor would choose a date from among three unseen members of the opposite sex after asking them questions. He followed that the next year with The Newlywed Game, another question-and-answer show that put just-married couples’ compatibility to the test. Both shows stayed on the air into the mid-1970s.
Barris’ next game shows were less successful, but he came up with the concept that would catapult him to a new level of fame: The Gong Show, which had its premiere on NBC in June 1976. The show featured a series of performers, most of them amateurs, and a panel of three celebrity judges. Barris himself was the brash host.
The show, which ran on NBC until 1978 and then in syndication became a cultural sensation. Barris knew there was a large audience for lowbrow. At one point the daytime version was attracting 78 percent of viewers ages 18 to 49.
“In my opinion, a good game show review is the kiss of death,” Barris said in a Salon interview in 2001. “If for some strange reason the critic liked it, the public won’t.”
Barris gradually withdrew from the television world, turning to writing. He had already written one book, You and Me, Babe (1974). That first book had sold well, but it was the next one that would give Barris another burst of notoriety: Confessions of a Dangerous Mind (1984) was an autobiography in which he claimed that while traveling in his role as a television producer in the 1960s he also was an assassin for the CIA.
He is survived by his wife, Mary Kane.