The Price Is Wrong, Drew, by Jenny Bahn

While flipping though channels on my elliptical machine’s mini-TV, I stop in at the new and improved The Price is Right, now hosted by bespectacled and charmingly robust Drew Carey.  It has been quite some time since I’ve seen the show, possibly years.  Bob Barker retired eons ago, but I had already outgrown the show at that point, and the tearful sendoff and the subsequent transition of power ultimately left me unfazed.  Even though I love Drew Carey and the “Ohio!” echo he permanently seared into my brain back in the 90s, nothing really entices me to watch, for no real reason other than, well, I grew out of it.

It seems strange to me, as I look at a crowd of graying and/or balding fifty-somethings that these people never did.  I never looked at The Price is Right as a children’s show, but it was certainly more engaging – for me personally – when I was working with the capacity of a five-year-old brain as opposed to my current, better-seasoned state of intellect.

Me and Bob Barker were good buds back in the day.  I admired his Oompa-Loompa-tan and he appreciated my ability to stay glued to the television set while he sauntered around the stage in his trim suits and his big smile, changing the lives of contestants’ one trip to Switzerland at a time.  I can’t quite pinpoint what was so appealing about the show.  It is possible that I was overwhelmed by the palpable and overwhelming excitement of its audience members, all having taken the week off of work to travel from Anywhere, USA to sunny Los Angeles, California for the chance to hear those famous words “Come on ddoooowwwwnnn!”  The stakes were high; I could feel it.  At the age of five I fully understood their anxious desire to approximate the cost of a bottle of dish soap.

My ability to relate to the ridiculous was clearly heightened in my preschool days.  When your world revolves around finger-painting and naptime, watching a big-busted girl walk around a shiny blue Chevy, petting its curves with a well-manicured hand, is a welcomed vacation.  One day I could be that, I thought to myself.

I was a young sucker for visual stimuli.  I surmise to guess that my fascination with the show was also due in part to some psychological trickery conjured up by seasoned professionals.  What I remember most from The Price is Right as a child is a stage that was like a step-up from Sesame Street: it had all of the vibrant colors, but there were lights and flashy cars and wheels that spun around and around, the numbers all aglitter.  The Price is Right represented a life I was capable of living myself and that’s why it was so engaging.

The game show is, in actuality, essentially a supermarket filled with items devoid of price stickers.  In real life, this would be fucking annoying.  You’d have to consult an associate, do a price check, walk back up the aisles, get a different item, etc.  Three hours later you would walk out the door with some toothpaste and a box of Triscuits.  The Price is Right – and most TV – is fantasyland escapism.  But the strange thing about this particular show is that it is not based around an exotic, remote fantasy …  but something from your own backyard, or rather, household cabinets.  No one is escaping anything; you’re just throwing some glitter on a Rite Aid and calling it a good time.

As I watch a woman play a newer segment of the show called “Then and Now” which involves guessing if a specific price is from the past or present, I wonder why the hell this is fun anymore.  We live in a time-crunched society.  There isn’t enough time in a day.  With the acceleration of technology and the ever-blurring line between home life and work life, twenty-four hours seems like a paltry daily stipend to get things done with.  But these people have the time to sit on a show and guess whether or not a six-pack of Mott’s Apple Juice was $3.65 twenty-five years ago or yesterday?  And even worse, people sit at home and watch this?

The show breaks for commercials, most of them targeting bored housewives or the nearly dead – not mutually exclusive, by the way.  One advertizes a motorized wheelchair called “The Hover Round.”  This type of shit always gives me anxiety.  The idea that one day I might possibly lose natural mobility and be relegated to “strolling” through a park with the assistance of rubber wheels and a joystick makes my skin crawl.  And then, to add insult to injury, I might get stuck in front of a broke-ass TV set in the community living room of a retirement home, watching the 2082 reincarnation of this same fucking show, hosted by an older Zac Efron.

Back to the show.

Three glorified hand models slink around the stage, wearing tropical-colored Icecapades dresses, their Crest Kid smiles blinding the audience.  A grown man mimes the act of eating out of a bowl to a contestant he may or may not actually know.  I block out everything else up until the point when two badly dressed, beer-gutted gentlemen duke it out in the final portion of the show, guessing the cost of a trip to Belize versus the cost of a sport boat.

Despite the fact that this show is an institution, I would have no qualms about watching it fade into oblivion.  It has no place in our society at this point.  Perhaps it is charming to know that my mother watched this when she was a child and I watched it when I was a child, but I sure as hell won’t be subjecting my yet-to-be-born children to it for the sake of tradition.  This might make me a grouchy miser, and I probably am.  But that doesn’t change the fact that The Price is Right is living in the wrong decade, and probably has been for quite some time.

We go through life not thinking about a lot of things.  The fact that it took me twenty-six years to realize that The Price is Right represents a cultural holdover from the pre-feminist revolution days of yore greatly disturbs me.  What riles me further is that a lot people will never realize this … ever.  They will never think of the show within the context of our daily lives.  They will not look at The Price is Right and think, Man, this shit is totally irrelevant.  They’ll simply continue on, blindly digesting whatever slop comes on … kind of like me at the age of four.

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