What party game would make the most boring game show you can imagine? If you can think of it, they’ve tried it. Bingo? Game Show Network, 2008. Pictionary? Just got canceled after three seasons. That’s right: Pictionary got more seasons than Freaks and Geeks. Hangman? That one’s actually been going steady for a good half a century. You probably know it better as Wheel of Fortune.
When game show titan Merv Griffin was first developing what would become Vanna White’s starmaking property, he was inspired by games of Hangman he used to play with his sister on long family car trips. When he brought the idea to NBC, “they all thought it had great potential as a game show,” he wrote. At least, that’s what they told him, because you didn’t question Merv Griffin’s game show ideas in 1975. However, “it needed a hook,” they politely suggested.
“That’s when I remembered the wheel,” Griffin wrote. “When I was a kid, our church had an annual bazaar, and there was always a wheel that spun around with prizes written on the spokes. If you were lucky enough to hold a ticket with the right number on it, you won. During all those years that I did The Merv Griffin Show at Caesars Palace, surrounded by blackjack and crap tables, it was always the big spinning wheel that I was drawn to. It drove me crazy. I could never win on it, but I still loved to play.” In other words, Wheel of Fortune is made up almost entirely of Merv Griffin’s childhood memories and compulsions.
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After sending the president of his production company to Las Vegas to learn everything about how those wheels worked, there was just one more hitch. Lin Bolen, head of daytime programming at NBC, decided the show needed something to attract women and suggested adding a shopping feature. The subsequent pilot, then called Shopper’s Bazaar, was pretty close to the game show we know today. The main differences were the exact items on the wheel, which included the chance to pick up a phone and hear a secret clue, because as we all know, the only thing women love more than shopping is yapping. Some minor tweaks, mostly the addition of a contestant-spun wheel and the iconic board with turnable letters, resulted in a second pilot for the Wheel of Fortune we all know and love, and TV executives never thought about appealing to women again.