While audiences hear it announced daily as “television’s most exciting hour,” The Price Is Right’s production staff call their studio “the happiest place on Earth.”
That certainly was the vibe when emmy editor Phil Pirrello visited the CBS game show’s new Glendale soundstage. He got a behind-the-scenes look at how the team has made Contestant’s Row one of television’s most riveting destinations for more than 50 years. (The daytime show is now in its 52nd season.)
A key contributor to the set’s jovial mood is host Drew Carey, who prefers to approach the prize games on the same footing as those who play them. “I like to be surprised along with the audience and not know which game they will be playing, so it feels like I’m playing it with them,” he says. When Carey first took over hosting duties from Bob Barker in 2007, producers would brief him with a list of each day’s games (six total, not including the Big Wheel). But after a few years, once he’d mastered the rules of play for each game in rotation (as one would the rules of a card game), Carey found that the gameplay felt more exciting for everyone if he was experiencing every roll of Dice Game’s oversized die and each clickety-click drop of a Plinko chip right alongside the contestants.
That choice seems to have paid off. With 190 shows a year, The Price Is Right is enjoying renewed popularity on both social media and on TV; in 2019 CBS added a primetime version called The Price Is Right at Night, which aired extra episodes during the recent strikes. “We look at what the viewers love and what’s going on in the world, and we try to come up with fun and clever ways to make the show a little more exciting,” executive producer Evelyn Warfel explains from “the Perch,” a control room–like platform where she and director Adam Sandler (no, not the actor) monitor a wall of screens displaying real-time camera feeds. Just beyond a black, Oz-like curtain to the left of the Perch sits another show staple: the Mighty Sound Effects Lady, whose name the producers didn’t reveal.
What they did reveal was how that quest for excitement drives the creation of new prize games and the refitting of old ones. For the latter, Warfel says it sometimes boils down to “just feeling tired of looking at the same old color scheme” and wanting to update it. As for newer games, origin stories vary. Sandler came up with “Gridlock,” for example, during his L.A. commute, aptly enough. The goal is “always to put together a game that the show doesn’t have,” he says. “We have many ‘higher or lower’ kinds of games, so we want a [game] mechanic that isn’t derivative. We like to have lots of variety, and we try to keep it really fresh.”
That thinking also applies to the hour’s climactic Showcase. After two rounds of spinning the wheel, two contestants square off to bid on anything from exotic trips to motorcycles or boats. (The show tapes both wheelspins back-to-back before a live audience but airs them as separate segments.) Warfel and Sandler pride themselves on the Showcase prize-reveals being just as unpredictable as the events leading up to them. “We try to make sure there’s a variety amongst the pricing and the [presentation] language,” Warfel says. “You don’t want to have the same kind of similar theme repeating too often.” To avoid repetition, the producers use a grid to track all the prizes. “We check against that grid all season. We have a budget for the season, so we are mindful of that as we go.” As for prizes that no one wins, their fates can vary. “We sometimes push them into the next season if it’s still in production,” Warfel says. “We return items and get new things from vendors. Obviously, all the cars go back.” Sometimes, prizes end up as furniture in the Perch.
Carey considers it a privilege to watch cars and other prizes go home with lucky contestants. That “happiest place on Earth” mindset extends to all corners of The Price Is Right set, especially the sliding doors that he steps through each episode: “I get there, the door opens and you’re surrounded by this energy, and it’s kind of impossible not to ride that wave.”
