Points on the Board for Women Game Show Hosts
By Michael Jones | May 14, 2020
National treasure Jane Lynch of Best in Show, Glee, and Hollywood Game Night fame made headlines when she said that when it comes to hosting game shows, women are practically invisible.
“Hollywood Game Night might have started this revival, but there's still no more female hosts,” Lynch said. “There's just kind of an inability to open up the mind, I think, to females hosting things.”
Preach, Jane. If our math is correct, of the hundreds of game shows in television history, less than 5% of the hosts have been women. You can practically count them using just your fingers and toes. And that fact has us holding up at least one finger to the TV gods.
So we’re going to take a look back, and while the number may be small, pull out some of the best of the best women who not only scored big as hosts, but did so in an industry practically designed to ignore them. We’ll take “Women Who Rock As Game Show Hosts for $600.”
Vicki Lawrence: Win, Lose or Draw
She starred alongside Carol Burnett in the 1970s and during the 1980s spun off the Thelma Harper character to her own show on Mama’s Family. But from 1987-1989, comic legend Vicki Lawrence helmed NBC’s Win, Lose or Draw. This show had some killer opening credits. Each show started with Lawrence revealing intricately drawn sketches of four celebrity guests on paper. Two contestants would join those celebrities and square off against each other on a set that was literally modeled off of Burt Reynolds’ real-life living room. (Turns out Burt Reynolds was one of the producers of the show!)
This show is well worth the YouTube rabbit hole just to see your favorite 80s celebrities sketched out in caricature form. But if you want one good episode that gives you the ambiance of Burt’s living room and some peak 80s guests, head over here and watch Lawrence welcome Night Court’s Markie Post, theater icon (and Judy Garland’s daughter) Lorna Luft, a very young pre-Everybody Loves Raymond and then Star Search champion Brad Garrett, and quite possibly one of the best 80s TV villains, Dallas’ Ken Kercheval.
Elayne Boosler: Balderdash
Vicki wasn’t the only comedy queen who helmed a game show. Stand-up favorite Elayne Boosler got a turn as the host of Balderdash, a game show version of the popular board game where celebrities told essentially ‘two lies and a truth’ and contestants had to guess the ‘truth.’ Boosler is a boss. The daughter of a Russian acrobat and Romanian ballerina, Boosler was a roommate of Andy Kaufmann’s in Greenwich Village in the 70s, became the first woman to get her own comedy special on Showtime (which she self-financed because producers didn’t believe people would tune in to women comics), hosted the Cable ACE Awards, and moderated a presidential primary debate.
Any one of those things would be a career highlight, let alone all of them wrapped up into one lifetime. You can see her own the Balderdash stage here, with celebrities Sally Struthers, comic writer Bruce Vilanch, and radio host Stephanie Miller. You know an episode is going to be good when it begins with Sally Struthers talking about Billy Bob Thornton’s fear of furniture older than 1950.
Karyn Bryant: Name That Video
Before Beat Shazam there was the VH-1 gem Name That Video, a reboot of the classic Name That Tune. The host was 90s MTV VJ and former CNN Talk Back Live anchor Karyn Bryant. Name That Video was the show “that tests your music video knowledge by going into the VH-1 vault,” and had three contestants competing for things like Toyotas decked out with a CD collection curated by VH-1 to reflect the greatest albums in rock history. My favorite bit of this show was the “Spoken Word” section, where a robot-voice (think Moviefone) would read an artist's lyrics and contestants would have to guess the song. “Some. Boys. Kiss. Me. Some. Boys. Hug. Me. I. Think. They’re. Okay.”
Whatever you say there, Watson. Bryant, meanwhile, remains a prolific commentator for things like mixed martial arts and current pop culture phenomena like Killing Eve. And I’d argue that her “quarantine bread” looks as good as any other baker’s during COVID-19.
Betty White: Just Men!
TV titan Betty White was no stranger to game shows. From The Match Game to Password to What’s My Line, and more, White was dubbed “the first lady of game shows.” Turns out she was also the first woman to ever win a Daytime Emmy Award for hosting a game show, too, for a very short-lived 1983 game show called Just Men!
The premise of Just Men!: Two women compete against each other to try and win a set of car keys from a panel of seven celebrities who, you guessed it, were all JUST MEN. It wasn’t the barometer of gender equality. The Washington Post even dubbed it “the litmus test for people who think the TV show that can make them physically ill hasn't been invented.” Yikes.
Still, given her Emmy win, White did make history with the show. You can watch an episode here with a who’s who of 1983 personalities including actor Fred Willard, Fantasy Island’s Hervé Villechaize, The Young and the Restless’ Steven Ford (incidentally also the son of former US President Gerald Ford!), Wheel of Fortune’s Pat Sajak, Hill Street Blues’ Taurean Blacque, St. Elsewhere’s Terence Knox, and second baseman for the 1983 Los Angeles Dodgers.
Elaine Joyce: The All New Dating Game
Variations of The Dating Game have been around for nearly 60 years, but for one season – 1986-1987 – the show was hosted by actress Elaine Joyce, the only woman to host the show in any variation. If you’ve ever watched the 1961 classic West Side Story, look for a young Joyce as an extra. Or if musicals aren’t your thing, try the 1980 horror classic Motel Hell, about a butcher/farmer who runs a “motel” who traps travelers, kills them, and harvests their bodies for human sausages. Mmmmmm. And speaking of meat, you can hear bachelor #3 talk about his ribs on this clip of Joyce hosting the show from 1987.
Arlene Francis: Blind Date
We’re going back to 1949, practically the dawn of television, to talk about Arlene Francis. The very first woman to host a television game show, Francis was a radio personality throughout the 30s and 40s, and for six years hosted a radio game show called Blind Date, a pre-Dating Game matchmaking show. In 1949 the show jumped from radio to television, and Francis hosted it for its first three seasons. Dubbed “the first lady of television” by Newsweek, Francis would go on to become a fixture on What’s My Line for decades. And while it’s no Motel Hell, Francis also has some horror movie cred to her name: in 1932 she played the role of a streetwalker who dies at the hands of mad scientist Bela Lugosi in Murders in the Rue Morgue. Get your classic TV fix here and watch Francis host an episode of Blind Date from 1951.
Summer Sanders: Figure it Out
If you were born in the late 80s or early 90s, guess what? You’re getting old, and it’s all downhill after 25! But also, that means you likely grew up with Summer Sanders on your TV set as the host of blockbuster Nickelodeon game show Figure It Out. The show had a panel of kid celebrities who had to guess (or, ahem, figure out!) the secret talent of a young contestant. Sanders herself was a four-time Olympic swimming medalist from the 1992 Barcelona games, training which probably had nothing to do with her hosting gig on Figure it Out. Yet she stands out as one of the best hosts on this list. Maybe it’s the energy, the connection with the kids on the show, or the ability to just go along with the totally unpredictable, like in this episode where the contestant’s secret talent is that “he hangs lizards off of his tongue.” (Give him a break, he’s from Florida.)
Meredith Vieira: Who Wants To Be a Millionaire
We have to end this list with the equivalent of a fine wine, the best scotch, the expensive tequila, or the highest quality non-alcoholic drink of your choice (what’s the best flavor of Capri Sun?). That would be Meredith Vieira, who took the Millionaire franchise over from Regis Philbin and not only made it a daytime hit, but did so while serving as host for two of the most high profile shows in daytime TV history at the same time (The View and then The Today Show). Viera’s stint on Millionaire garnered her two Daytime Emmy Awards for best game show host – making her the second woman to win this and the first to win multiple times – and all told she filmed more than 1,800 episodes and oversaw contestants winning $70 million. That puts her into some peak game show history canon. And interestingly enough, it almost didn’t happen: producers offered the job first to Rosie O’Donnell, who turned it down. Take a look at the bookend episodes of Vieira’s rule of the show: her very first one in 2002, and her very last one 11 years later.
An unabashed 80s & 90s pop culture junkie, Michael Jones is a Brooklyn-based writer and co-host of the Pop Trash Podcast.