World of fortune

There may be no more fitting symbol for the West's
victory in the Cold War than Wheel of Fortune -- now
one of the most successful television shows
on the planet

by Steven Stark

For a time in the 1990s, Paul Gilbert may well have been the world's foremost expert on television's monster hit Wheel of Fortune. During a span of almost two decades, Gilbert viewed well over 6000 episodes of the popular syndicated game show, which ran five times a week usually at around 6:30 or 7 p.m., between the news and the start of prime-time programming. This means that Gilbert, who worked on the show's premiere in the mid 1970s with creator Merv Griffin, saw the wheel turn well over 100,000 times, the puzzle solved on more than 15,000 occasions, and a contestant scream maybe 5000 times. He probably witnessed the giveaway of a fleet of cars, not to mention countless mantel clocks, serving carts, and whatever else might be thrown in for good measure. After almost 20 years, he could probably recite the show's disembodied opening call ("Wheel of Fortune!") backwards, and flip letters on the game board with an aplomb worthy of hostess Vanna White.

As the director of international program development and international projects for King World Productions, the company that distributes Wheel of Fortune to over 50 countries, however, Gilbert became more than just a game-show sage. He was at the center of an enormous corporate effort which in turn was part of a far larger movement that saw American television and its popular culture engulf the planet.

The products of Hollywood have become one of our more influential -- if not economically vital -- exports, ranking just behind agriculture. Beverly Hills 90210 was a hit in Australia, Italy, and Brazil; The Cosby Show drew high ratings in South Africa, even during apartheid; Dynasty rose to near the top of the charts in China; and Tom & Jerry cartoons became a hit in, of all places, Lebanon. As Marshall McLuhan predicted, the world has become a global village -- and, throughout that village, the natives all drink Coke, eat Big Macs, wear Mickey Mouse watches, buy Barbie Dolls, and follow the career of Arnold Schwarzenegger, film by film. As Gore Vidal has said, the capital of the world is no longer Washington, but Hollywood -- whose pervasive global role and influence have been compared to that of the Church in medieval times.

One of the sacred rites of today's "Church" has been Wheel of Fortune, one of the most consistent American television hits abroad in the 1990s. Since going international in Australia in the mid 1980s, the show was often watched by more than 100 million people each week in places such as Turkey, Hungary, and Croatia -- which launched its own show in the early '90s and saw it go directly to number one. Whether the country was Finland, Belgium, Israel, or Denmark, the show tended to dominate its time slot. Kolo Fortany was the most popular program in Poland for a time in the mid 1990s, where it was watched by an astounding 70 percent of the nation's households. One night, the show asked viewers to turn off their lights if they were watching -- and whole neighborhoods went black. In France, long diffident to any American pop-culture product not starring Jerry Lewis, there were near-riots when La Roue de la Fortune held its contestant tryouts.

One reason for Wheel's success was that the international versions were often custom-made for countries, in their own languages. "If I tried to do an American game in Germany, people wouldn't watch it," Fred Cohen, president of King World Productions, once said. "The idioms wouldn't work, and it wouldn't be their show." Thus, about half the foreign editions have their own version of Pat Sajak, their own Vanna, their own prizes, and their own distinctive puzzles.

Game shows, of course, were traditionally designed as daytime fare for housewives, and still bear some of the earmarks of their origin: good-looking male hosts; mostly women in the studio audience and as contestants; and household goods as prizes. Merv Griffin modeled Wheel on the old childhood game of hangman. The premise was unnervingly simple. Three contestants each spin the wheel in turn. If the wheel stops on an amount of money, the player gets credit for that money and a chance to guess a letter in the mystery phrase, which can run the gamut from MEDIUM RARE to BETTER LUCK NEXT TIME or SATURDAY MORNING CARTOONS. If a contestant guesses a letter that appears in the phrase, the contestant gets to go again; otherwise, play passes to the next player. Each goes in turn until someone guesses the phrase, winning the money he or she has accumulated and additional prizes. At the end of the show, the contestant with the most money has a chance to compete in the bonus round and win a really big prize, such as a cruise.

Trying to describe the popularity and mystique of Wheel of Fortune simply by reciting its rules, however, is like trying to do the same with baseball. There's a lot more to it, and many of those subtleties evolved as the kinks in the game were worked out in daytime obscurity in the '70s. At one point, contestants were given clues to the puzzle by a telephone, which rang on a table. That took too long. Originally, the all-important wheel lay flat, and so couldn't really be seen by home viewers enough to engage them. (The installation of an overhead camera made it more visible to the home viewer.) Winning contestants used to go shopping onstage with their winnings, a segment that was ended once cable channels began offering home viewers a similar experience. In the beginning, there was also only one host -- the traditional male -- and the board was run electronically.

The key changes began to come in 1983, after eight years on NBC's daytime schedule, when Griffin took the then-unusual route of offering his game show in syndication to local stations looking for an evening program to fill the niche between the news and prime time. With far more men and people with daytime jobs watching at that hour, the show changed and went upscale: the set got glitzier, the prizes got better, the puzzles got harder, and Vanna White's newly created role as letter-turner was glamorized. The shrewd result, which neatly coincided with the rise of the Reagan era's celebration of conspicuous consumption, was the biggest syndication success in television history until then, as Wheel drew ratings higher than those of many prime-time shows.

Over the years, as the show retained its hold on the viewing audience far longer than the typical program, other changes were added. The show has thus raised to an art form the process of everything from how to lay out merchandise on the set, to how to pick contestants. (First you have to take a written test. Then you're put through a practice round with other Wheel wannabes, to see if you get excited, smile, are outgoing, and like to have fun. Only a very small percentage of those who try out make it.)

Why this rather simple show so consistently captivated America became a source of speculation for everyone from writers for People to left-wing social theorists. The simple explanation was that the game "plays well" at home, while appealing to both genders and to all ages. Like Monopoly, the country's most beloved board game, Wheel combined in roughly equal measures elements of gambling (the wheel), intellect (guessing the puzzle), and money (winning prizes). Critics such as Alexander Cockburn found in Wheel an "idealized representation of the proper motions of the economy" -- contestants didn't so much compete with one another for material awards as against the wheel and their own intellectual capabilities. Vanna White's appeal came in for some heavy analysis, too, with one Yale psychologist reasoning, in an academic journal, that what contestants are really playing for is not money, but Vanna herself. "No matter how many letters Ms. White turns over," he wrote, "the message is always the same: `Take it off, Vanna!' "

In any event, the show was a virtual gold mine for King World, not only because it was popular but because it was cheaper and easier to produce than the average dramatic show. Many sponsors donated the prizes for publicity value, and there was little of the usual high costs for actors, new sets, or scores of writers that plague other shows. That meant Wheel was made to order for a world market which often can't afford the extravagant overhead of a Hollywood production.

Wheel had the advantage of hitting the international market at a time when many countries were allowing private broadcasters to compete with state-run television for the first time. The Iron Curtain was also crumbling, opening up a vast new territory for commercial television. Those events created a ready-made market for the kind of cookie-cutter programming that a game show offers, and particularly one produced locally in the native language. "In most of the world, television was designed to be an information or propaganda medium," Ellen Politi, an executive who worked on Wheel, once said. "In the United States, it was designed to be an entertainment medium, and we understand better than anyone else how to do that."

There were some problems. Though Western Europe had a history of game shows, Eastern Europe did not, and the production values were far different, at least in the beginning. Some audiences had to be taught to clap, and contestants had to be taught when to scream or even smile. "You couldn't give away big products like refrigerators in some of these countries because the winners couldn't afford to pay the taxes on them without selling the prize," said Cohen.

Some programmers at King World had originally thought that Jeopardy! (their other syndicated game-show hit) would be a better fit for the world. "But the problem we ran into is that a lot of people elsewhere don't understand the concept of receiving an answer and then having to guess the question," explained Cohen. "You give them the answer and they think that's the end of it." Jeopardy! was also more expensive to produce because of the complicated electronic set that has to feature all those answers.

The puzzles of Wheel of Fortune were also a little different abroad, even after the translation into Flemish, Hungarian, or Turkish. American pop culture does rule the world, which is why Elvis Presley could be a puzzle answer in Germany, or Donald Duck in Belgium. Once you got away from music and movies, however, foreign puzzles tended to be harder -- a tribute, perhaps, to the dumbing down of America, or at least to the concept that viewers here would rather beat the TV contestants than admire them.

There were also some regional distinctions. In several countries, laws prevented shows from giving away money, so contestants just played for prizes. Finland filmed its shows on board a cruise ship. A children's version of the game was introduced in -- where else? -- Denmark, the home of Hans Christian Andersen. In some places, new categories were added to the traditional phrases or names of celebrities. In Holland, for example, there was a category entitled "Canals." Eastern-bloc countries differed a bit from those in the West, too. That's less because of the production values, which tended to be surprisingly high, and more because of the prizes, which (at least in the beginning) didn't quite measure up to the standards of the West.

The larger question, of course, is why this particular show was able to grip the rest of the world as firmly as it did the United States. Through a combination of shrewdness and luck, Wheel had found itself at the center of a number of hot trends in America. Its emphasis on the gambling wheel resonated in a culture where state lotteries and legalized gambling were proliferating. Even the mystical metaphor of "the wheel of fortune" was bound to strike a chord in a culture where half the books on the nonfiction bestseller list usually deal with spirituality and the other half deal with how to make more money. Yet those gambling and spiritual metaphors also carried currency worldwide, as did the show's preoccupation with conspicuous consumption and material success. With its mingling of prizes and the game -- or advertising and programming -- Wheel was as good an introduction as any to the Brave Old World of commercial programming.

Wheel's success abroad, however, was also due to the way it presented key elements of American folklore and values to the globe daily, in some places for the first time. Take the Horatio Alger myth -- the appealing idea that on the level playing field that is America, anyone can advance to the top through hard work. At home or abroad, most Wheel contestants appeared to be about the same height, and dress in the same way. The capriciousness of the wheel (or life) aside, they had an equal opportunity to advance based on intellectual -- though not academic -- skills. Unlike the old quiz shows such as The $64,000 Question, Wheel required street-smart knowledge, not an arcane ability to recall the tiniest details of a subject.

In its own way, Wheel also reflected a true understanding of the nature of television -- which Americans, after all, do comprehend better than anyone else. When asked about the success of their show abroad, the producers of Wheel cited its simplicity. "It's the kind of show you can leave for a few minutes and come back and grasp immediately," said Paul Gilbert, who left King World in 1996 to become vice-president of international product development at Columbia Tri-Star. There is a profound lesson there about the nature of our television -- if not our pop culture -- and why it is so appealing and exportable. Other nations developed their popular culture with specific goals in mind: in Britain, the purpose was to uplift the populace; in the Soviet Union, it was to propagandize. By contrast, driven by the impulses of the market, American popular culture just wanted to entertain its audience, and therefore developed a much better sense of what sells elsewhere.

What's more, America is a nation of immigrants. As Todd Gitlin has written, any pop-culture product that has succeeded here has already been test-marketed in a multicultural environment which best resembles the world market. That fact has an historical counterpart, too: our popular culture had its origins in the rowdiness of turn-of-the-century vaudeville. In that setting, before an audience where many couldn't speak good English, it was necessary to create entertainment that could be grasped quickly, without knowing much of the language.

That intrinsic search for the simplicity that appeals universally is the secret of the success of American popular culture abroad. It also contains an intuitive understanding of the way people watch TV. Throughout its history, television has been criticized frequently for its failures to educate and to present better programming. Those are criteria better applied to other art forms, however. In its purest form, television is a user-friendly medium. It is designed for viewers in the home, often tired or just back from work, watching halfheartedly. Presenting what scholar Robert Thompson once called "the aesthetic of the anaesthetic," American television knows how to appeal to viewers who aren't paying full attention and just want to be entertained. It's no small feat to create that type of programming, and if Americans have mastered the art better than most, Wheel's creators did it better than most Americans.

This show's genius, of course, was that it delivered the world its daily dose of Americana in the guise of a game show -- often in each country's own language, no less. Today, for better or worse, the rush to modernity is largely identified in American terms: by buying our programs, these cultures not only buy our know-how and products; they buy our values. In the half-century "twilight struggle" between our ideology and communism, we won. Or, better yet -- if television is any guide -- Wheel of Fortune did.

Steven Stark is a commentator on National Public Radio and a former Phoenix columnist. This article is adapted from Glued to the Set: The 60 Television shows and Events That Made Us Who We Are Today (Free Press), published this month.