By Adam Nedeff, researcher for the National Archives of Game Show History
On September 21, host Drew Carey and model Rachel Reynolds kicked off The Price is Right by saying “Happy 55!” This year marks the 55th year of The Price is Right on CBS. In the late 1990s, when the show had been on the air for a quarter of a century and was already the longest-running game show in U.S. history, then-host Bob Barker observed that the show broke a record every time that they taped an episode. The 55th year is just another in a long list of milestones for the classic series. In addition to being the 55th year of The Price is Right, 2026 is also, oddly enough, the 70th anniversary of The Price is Right.
The first version of The Price is Right appeared on American television on November 26, 1956. Bob Stewart was a writer/producer hired by Mark Goodson/Bill Todman Productions to be an idea man for the company. (Stewart later created several successful game shows on his own, including Pyramid). Inspired by a nearby department store that held auctions during his lunch hour, Stewart created a game for Goodson-Todman in which contestants estimated the retail price of a prize, and the winner was the player whose estimate was closest without going over the retail price.
The original host was game show icon Bill Cullen, who hosted a popular morning radio show on WRCA (now WNBC) on weekday mornings. That show ran until 10 a.m. Bill made the trek from 30 Rockefeller Plaza (between 49th and 50th street on Sixth Avenue in Manhattan) to a nearby theater to host the live daily broadcast of The Price Is Right beginning at 11 a.m. The game show was broadcast from the Hudson Theater (six blocks away), then from the Century Theater (10 blocks from NBC), then from the Colonial Theater (15 blocks).
A fan familiar only with the modern incarnation would be puzzled by an episode of the original Price is Right. Pricing games like Plinko and Hole in One, iconic elements of today’s version, were nowhere to be seen. The entire half-hour was a sequence of unveiling a prize, bidding, revealing the price, awarding the prize, and moving on to the next prize. As the show was broadcast on NBC’s daytime (daily) and nighttime (weekly) schedules, the series needed attention-grabbing prizes for nighttime (as was common practice on other prize-based game shows, including nighttime Concentration). The prize list included: a roller coaster, a submarine, a firetruck, the deed to a laundromat, a Ferris Wheel, an island, a live steer, a covered wagon, a chariot, and one mile of hot dogs.
The original series also included a daily feature called the Showcase, but it was different from today’s version. A collection of prizes was presented to viewers at home, who were encouraged to send their bids, by U.S. mail, on postcards. The postcard with the closest bid (without going over) won the Showcase prize. It was a very popular feature: at its peak, TPIR received 19 million postcards for each Showcase.
The Price is Right aired on NBC daytime from 1956 until 1963. The nighttime edition aired beginning in 1957. (In those days, most people used the term “nighttime,” less commonly “prime-time). This was followed by a two-year run on ABC daytime, and just one year on ABC nighttime.
In the 1950s and 1960s, Goodson-Todman owned and produced a lot of shows (To Tell the Truth, Beat the Clock, What’s My Life, I’ve Got a Secret, Password, and more). After their initial runs, the company learned to revise and revive the series for network and for the newly active syndication marketplace (selling through a distribution directly to local stations for certain time slots.
By 1972, Goodson-Todman was developing a revival of The Price is Right for a once-a-week run in syndication. The new host was to be Dennis James, a veteran whose extensive career, much of it on NBC, will be documented in a future article. CBS caught wind of the new version of The Price Is Right and decided it would be ideal for its new daytime schedule. James’ long-time association with NBC became an issue, so the long-time host of Truth or Consequences, another popular series from the 1960s, got the job: Bob Barker.
To distinguish the revised series from the Bill Cullen original, the reboot was titled The New Price is Right, debuting at 10:30 a.m. on September 4, 1972. It took the place of Beverly Hillbillies reruns and took direct aim at NBC’s longest running game show, Concentration (ABC’s network programming did not begin until 11:30 a.m.), and extinguished it. Then, CBS replaced Price with The $10,000 Pyramid to the 10:30 a.m. time slot and moved Price to 3 p.m. to draw viewers from NBC’s Another World, and ABC’s General Hospital — both soap operas. The strategy was only marginally successful, and in November, 1975, Price moved back to mornings, now at 10:30 a.m. to compete against NBC’s Wheel of Fortune, which, at the time, was getting roughly the same audience numbers as Concentration. By 1979, the new version of Price landed in the familiar 11 a.m. time slot—the same time slot occupied by the Bill Cullen version all those years ago.
And the rest…is game show history.
