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Of all the great things about television, the greatest is that it’s on every single day. TV history is being made, day in and day out, in ways big and small. In an effort to better appreciate this history, we’re taking a look back, every day, at one particular TV milestone.
IMPORTANT DATE IN TV HISTORY: August 16, 1999
PROGRAM ORIGINALLY AIRED ON THIS DATE: Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?
WHY IT’S IMPORTANT: There were surely summer TV sensations before Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?, and there definitely were summer TV sensations after it (just the next year, Survivor debuted and created the reality television genre as we know it). The revolution that Millionaire kicked off was more short-lived and cyclical. Game show trends come and go — just this summer, ABC experienced success (though on a much, much more modest scale) with the revivals of Match Game and The $100,000 Pyramid — and the massive success of Millionaire only spiked the primetime game show trend for a few years. Long enough to make room for The Weakest Link, but still only a few years.
But what a summer that was! Regis Philbin, at just shy of age 68, was suddenly the hottest star on all of TV, all because ABC promised to pay out a million bucks to anyone who could successfully answer a succession of increasingly difficult multiple choice questions. It’s hard to understate just how pervasive things like “Is that your final answer?” and “I’d like to phone a friend” became, almost immediately. But beyond the buzzwords, Millionaire set the template for how game shows would look (dark studios, glowing blue color schemes) and feel (high drama; personal stories from the contestants) for years to come.
Here’s what’s crazy: the original run of the series on ABC primetime only lasted three years. The network rode the success of the show hard, airing it on multiple nights and throughout the year. Odds are the show’s popularity wouldn’t have lasted much longer if they’d have slow-played it either, but it’s notable that less than three years after the show debuted, it was downsized to daytime syndication.
Of course, the most famous moment in the history of the show was in November of 1999, when John Carpenter became the show’s first ever million-dollar winner. Was the question dumbed down because producers were impatient at not having a million-dollar winner yet? No one can say. But knowing that Richard Nixon appeared on Laugh-In is pretty easy for a million-dollar question. Compare that to the second million-dollar question (“How many million miles is it from the Earth to the sun?”) and it becomes a little glaring.
But we remember Millionaire fondly. Without it, the term “lifeline” wouldn’t have as many meanings. And The Curious Case of Benjamin Button would have won the 2008 Oscar for Best Picture. And Regis Philbin wouldn’t have … nah, Regis always finds something.
