Esquire magazine has a very interesting behind-the-scenes look at why Drew Carey was so unhappy when a contestant guessed a showcase exactly on “Price is Right
“Everybody thought someone had cheated. We’d just fired Roger Dobko-witz, and all the fan groups were upset about it. I thought, Fuck, they just fucking fucked us over. Somebody fucked us over. I remember asking, ‘Are we ever going to air this?’ And nobody could see how we could. So I thought the show was never going to air. I thought somebody had cheated us, and I thought the whole show was over. I thought they were going to shut us down, and I thought I was going to be out of a job.”
And just over there, just on the other side of that curtain, was twice-perfect Terry Kniess, still dancing to the music. “I was like, Fuck this guy,” Carey says. “When it came time to announce the winner, I thought, It’s not airing anyway. So fuck him.”
Even before the Showcase, there had been a feeling among some of the show’s staff that something was amiss. The Price Is Right pays out of pocket for most of the prizes that it gives away, and the prize budget is fixed. If it’s been giving away too many cars especially, it’ll pull out some of the harder pricing games, Range Game or That’s Too Much, to balance the books. They’re not rigged, but they rely on the natural tendency of most contestants to guess somewhere in the middle. In the first instance, contestants almost always stop the game too early; in the second, they almost always stop it too late. The further the producers push the prices toward the extremes of possibility, the less likely someone will win. On that morning, however — no matter the game, prize, or price — everybody was winning. The show was getting rolled.
How it happened is pretty awesome:
Today, at his kitchen table, Terry says he’d seen all three prizes before. The karaoke machine was $1,000. The pool table, depending on the model, he says, went for between $2,800 and $3,200. Terry went with $3,000. The rule of thumb for campers, he knew, was about $1,000 a foot, plus a little more; he says today he’d actually misheard the length of the trailer, thought Rich Fields had said it was nineteen feet long — so, $19,000. That gave him $23,000. And then, he says, he got lucky. He picked 743 because that was the number he and Linda had used for their PINs, their securitycodes, their bets: their wedding date, the seventh of April, and her birth month, March. Here’s their wedding certificate, he says, and here’s her passport: $23,743.
“Actual retail price, $23,743,” Carey said. “You got it right on the nose. You win both Showcases.”
The aftermath:
When the show aired that December after all — pushed by CBS into the ratings doldrums — Carey was torched mostly for his lack of enthusiasm when he announced the perfect bid. The only scandal — outside the supermarket tabloids — was that he hadn’t done what Bob Barker would have done. Bob Barker would have made Terry Kniess into the greatest contestant in television-game-show history. Terry Kniess would have been anointed. “Oh, I would have run with that, you bet,” Barker says today from his happy retirement. Here was studio magic, here was perfection, here was this man who had never met innocent Roger Dobkowitz — no, here was only a smart man with silver hair, a disciplined man, a weatherman who had spent a lifetime being accurate, and who had also been a little bit lucky, and who had won a game that was made to be broken.
“Yeah, but that’s not what happened,” Carey says.
What happened?
“There was that guy, in the audience,” he says. “Ted.”
The story of Ted is a story in itself. Ted is a Price is Right fanatic who studied the show in the 80s with his VCR to learn number patterns and was an audience member 20something times before getting a chance to be a contestant and COME ON DOWN in 1992. When the Price is Right changed their contestant qualifications to allow return contestants after being absent from the stage for 10 years, Ted started trying again. Ted helped one guy win a thousand dollars and a frigging car (and the winner gave him nothing in return) after meeting him in line and then signaling him from the audience on what to bid. What does this have to do with Terry’s perfect bid?… Ted was seated next to Terry and his wife that day…
But the trail of coincidences doesn’t end there, since Terry says that he knew nothing of Ted’s history or knowledge of the game…
Even if he did, he says that he couldn’t have heard Ted shouting out numbers, the way he couldn’t hear Rich Fields call out his name. That if it seemed as though he was looking in Ted’s direction during his bid, he was actually looking at Linda, who confirmed his math by holding up fingers on both her hands: a two and a three, twenty-three. That Linda had gently scolded him after for giving away their PINs, which they’ve had to change since, and that it would have been impossible for him to have concocted, after the fact, such an elaborate creation myth, pulling out their wedding certificate and passports to explain why he had bid $23,743, a very exact bid. “I have no regrets,” Terry says, “but there have been times I’ve wondered, What have I done?” Other players had come close before. Five dollars. Eight dollars. It was easy. The answers were right in front of you. If only he’d bid $23,700, he still would have won both Showcases, and no one would have accused him of anything other than good fortune. Terry’s only sin that morning, he says, is that he was perfect.