The Substandard Loves Scarlett Johansson

I hadn’t realized how much Gong Show I absorbed as a kid. You know my parents were permissive about TV (the only time I remember being told to turn something off was while watching Eddie Murphy Raw), but there was disapproval in the air when The Gong Show was on. Still, I watched enough to recall the theme song, the judges, and many of the show’s regular bits. I watched the Popsicle Girls. Almost watched it again. And of course I caught the clip where Jaye P. Morgan got away with flashing her boobs on network TV. I even went so far as to watch an entire 1977 episode posted onto YouTube, featuring a young David Letterman as the straight-man judge. You said on the podcast that The Gong Show is the ’70s. I’d go further and say it’s 1977. That was the first year I really remember, and yet, given how quickly culture moved in the late ’70s, the show was a relic of its era almost immediately. The attitudes, the dress, the colors, the sleaziness, the music—they all looked dated a couple years hence. One saving grace on that front is that the show never gave out prizes like cars or living room sets with pre-inflation prices, like Let’s Make a Deal or The Price Is Right. I dove down the Wikipedia hole and learned another interesting bit about Chuck Barris’ show business demise: He created a show called Three’s a Crowd. I remember watching an episode or two on Game Show Network and need to see if any are posted on YouTube. ( Oh yes, they’re there.) Check out the Wikipedia discussion of this show. It sounds brilliantly problematic, as you’d put it on the podcast. Here’s Wikipedia: “The empire crumbled again amid the burnout of another of his creations, the 1979–80 Three’s a Crowd (in which three sets of wives and secretaries competed to see who knew more about their husbands/bosses). This show provoked protests from enraged feminist and socially conservative groups (two otherwise diametrically opposed viewpoints), who charged that the show deliberately exploited adultery, to advocate it as a social norm. Most stations dropped this show months before the season was over as a response to those criticisms.”