'Who Wants to Be A Millionaire?':My Day at the Set

Last fall, on one of my days off, I accepted an invitation from my college buddy Steve to join him and a few of his other friends to watch an afternoon taping of Who Wants to be a Millionaire? The consecutively filmed episodes, the last ones recorded before the show’s winter break, were set to air sometime between March 14 and 16, we were told.

The show airs at 12:30 pm and 1:05 am in the New York area, and I didn’t have a device to tape it from my set. But, if any of you tuned in during these past few days and saw someone who looked vaguely like me—well, don’t be surprised if it was!

No, I was not a contestant, but I enjoyed the show far more than if I had been, because I was in the front row of the audience immediately behind host Meredith Vieira. There’s an outside chance that, when the camera swept across the audience, it might have caught me in its line of sight.

The camera personnel, given their normal inclinations, I’m sure, would have far preferred to focus on my left, where one of Steve’s friends, a woman half my age and considerably more photogenic, sat. If I appeared on the show in any form, I’ll bet, you’d only see my vigorously clapping hands.

As is customary for prospective viewers, Steve—who has attended several times--was notified a few weeks beforehand of the tape day and time. Seating is done on a first-come, first-served basis, so we made sure we got on line by 1 pm, well before the start time. (Many of those waiting in front of the ABC Studio whiled away the time with a “photo op” with Vieira—or, in this case, a cardboard figure of her.)

The studio in which the show is taped is a theater-in-the-round arena, seating a few hundred people. It’s dark, with all kinds of dramatic lights periodically flashing--sort of like the pre-game show at the NBA All-Star Game, only in a much cozier environment.

The photo in the lower half of this post is offered by the CEO of this blog as proof that he was indeed at the studio. The image of Ms. Vieira at the top, on the other hand, is included here because of another one of my friends (and he knows who he is!!!!), who confesses to quite a yen for the veteran journalist and former Today Show host.

Regis Philbin might have made the show a hit, but it’s hard—at least for me—to envision anyone other than Ms. Vieira as its focal point now. The high-stakes hucksterism and show-biz sheen (that dramatic lighting, that music) inherent in the show somehow feels diluted with Vieira moving things along.

I had never, if you want to know the truth, watched the show much when Rege hosted it, even when it was such a phenomenon that ABC resorted to a prime-time gambit that, to my knowledge, it had last attempted when I was a mere pup, back when Batman was on the air: i.e., air the hit a couple of times a week. That stratagem, like the one involving the campy Caped Crusader, nearly killed the network’s cash cow.

A couple of years ago, the show’s producers decided to tweak some familiar formulas. This time, besides having a “Lifeline,” contestants can also “jump” to the next question. And, in a change in the show’s atmospherics, instead of using the old host chair, Vieira would stand virtually the entire time.

Though the incident occurred in her first year with the show, it wasn’t until 2009 that some flirtatious comments the host offered a contestant from the Navy (seen in this YouTube snippet) sparked some Internet complaints about sexual-harassment double-standards. My guess is that in the wake of that viral outburst, Vieira has curbed her spontaneity at least somewhat.

She still, however, comes across as a protective den mother for contestants. I don't think this is an act. That genuine warmth puts contestants at ease—or about as at ease as you can get knowing that hundreds of thousands of people are watching you, ready to second-guess your every answer, a thought that, by itself, can unleash flop-sweat of oceanic, even biblical (as in Noah's Ark) proportions.

The show’s ticket request form also allows people to sign up to audition. I had already determined I wasn’t going to try (bombing out in a county spelling bee in grade school--on the first word, no less—served as a lifelong lesson in humility, as edifying as it was mortifying). Yet, while I waited inside the studio, staffers were handing out tests to everyone.

Oh, what the hell, I thought, eyeing the questions with my sharpened pencil.

That instrument, along with the injunction we shortly heard not to ask anyone for answers, reminded me of the atmosphere of the SATs back in my Stone Age years (i.e., high school). In other words, I was feeling too old for this crap.

I’m not sure why the staffers even bothered issuing the no-talking-during-the-test rule. An audience member who’d taken the test on another occasion confirmed that the questions appeared largely unchanged from when he’d tried them. Were the show’s researchers too lazy to create a new set of questions? Or did they believe that the questions were, on the whole, so hard that few people would be able to figure them out anyway, even remember them after a few tries?

I was not one of those whose names were announced as having “passed” the test. The first questions seemed easy enough, but at least some must have tripped me up. (One likely culprit: the category teenage vampire “literature,” if one can term as literature something spreading like weeds in the nation’s remaining bookstores. Unfortunately, anyone hoping to make serious money on quiz shows for the foreseeable future will have to bone up on this category, I suppose.)

Failure is freeing, and in this case it put me and the other audience members in the position of Kevin Bacon’s Fenwick character in Diner, effortlessly barking out quiz-show answers in safety as contestants sweat their hour upon the stage. Actually, on the day I attended Millionaire’s taping, several contestants were gone much sooner than an hour.

One woman in particular, a cardiologist from Washington, astonished us when faced with the question, “Howard Stern is often referred to by what title?” It wasn’t so much that she didn’t know the answer (even Sherlock Holmes found no room in his capacious brain for the tidbit that the earth revolved around the sun), but that she didn’t logically think through how she might arrive at it.

Stumped, the doctor polled the audience. Then the unthinkable occurred: She rejected the response of 61% of the group, “The King of all Media,” even though the three-fifths majority came largely from New York, where the Obnoxious One has worked for years. What is she thinking?, people near me murmured, in incredulity and perhaps more than a little unkindness, as the good doctor elected to "jump."

A truly regrettable choice. The next question was harder:

“Architect Eero Saarinen used pipe cleaners to design the first model for what famous structure?

A: Lincoln Memorial
B: Space Needle
C: Brooklyn Bridge
D: Gateway Arch.”

She elected to go with C, and somewhere John and Washington Roebling groaned. The answer turned out to be D, and the genial doctor--who, it turned out, had previously made luckless appearances on Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego? and Jeopardy--ended up out of the money here, too.

I was somewhat surprised--though, in retrospect, I shouldn’t have been--to learn that quiz shows such as this require that the host re-record a few lines at the end of the taping. Vieira is such a pro that I hadn’t noticed any flubbed lines while she was interacting with contestants. But inevitably, anything can happen to make a line reading appear less than smooth on camera--even something visual rather than oral--so there Vieira was, after the contestants were escorted kindly but firmly offstage, with re-dos.

I imagine at least some of those contestants were wishing they could have had some of their own--at least when it came to answering questions. Happily (very happily, as you can see from the picture), I was not one of them.