Jack Barry (television)

Jack Barry (March 20, 1918 – May 4, 1984) was an American television game show host and producer, whose career was nearly ruined in the quiz show scandal of the late 1950s but who made a remarkable comeback over a decade later.

Early life and career

Barry (original surname Barasch) was born in Lindenhurst, New York and educated at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School of Finance and Commerce. In the 1940s he began on radio, where he met his partner Dan Enright. Once television broadcasting began, Barry and Enright would get involved in local programming, and eventually national programs, thanks in part to the success of early Jack Barry hits such as the children's show Winky Dink and You (conceivably the world's first interactive television program) as well as Juvenile Jury and Life Begins at 80. In the 1950s, Barry and Enright got involved in game shows, with Barry hosting The Big Surprise. He was eventually dismissed from his hosting duties and was replaced by Mike Wallace, making Barry decide to host his own game shows.

The quiz show scandals

In 1956, Barry and Enright debuted Twenty One, which was sponsored by Geritol, and Tic Tac Dough. Both game shows were hosted by Barry. In 1958, on one episode of Twenty One, a game between challenger Charles Van Doren and champion Herb Stempel was found to have been rigged. (The 1994 movie Quiz Show was based on the Stempel-Van Doren contests.)

Within three months of the published revelation, Twenty-One was cancelled; another Barry-Enright production, Tic-Tac-Dough, was cancelled as well. Barry next became the host of a new show Barry and Enright created with Robert Noah and Buddy Piper, Concentration. Barry was dismissed from the nighttime after four weeks, with the quiz show scandal ramping up and Barry-Enright forced to sell their production operation to NBC. The daytime Concentration, hosted for most of its original NBC run by Hugh Downs, ran for 15 years.

Though it was Enright and Twenty-One assistant, Albert Freedman who rigged the shows, Barry admitted in the 1970s and 80s his eventual role in covering for them once he found out. After sponsor Geritol complained to Barry and Enright about the dullness of the first, un-rigged Twenty-One episode (the two initial contestants repeatedly missed questions) Enright admitted in a 1991 PBS interview that "from then on we decided to rig Twenty-One." According to game-show historian Steve Beverly, the late Professor William Martin of the University of Georgia, one of the government investigators probing the quiz scandals, said Barry did not likely know the deception until after a Twenty-One episode during which Barry defended the show. According to Beverly, "Martin insisted Barry still likely did not know of the deception until after that night, when NBC began pressing for the truth and Enright, apparently aware the entire company could go down, told Barry of the controls."

Barry was apparently not averse to "juicing" a show, even after the Twenty-One and Tic Tac Dough debacles left his career in eclipse. A veteran quiz producer once said that in the 1960s, when Barry was working on a pilot of a Mark Goodson-Bill Todman production featuring "spontaneous" filmed responses, Barry would feed his respondents scripted lines to make them funnier.

After the scandals

Dan Enright found television work in Canada with Columbia-Screen Gems, while Jack Barry went to California. The two collaborated on small Canadian produced quiz shows including "Photo Finish" shot in Montreal and "It's a Match" taped in Toronto. It was on these shows that a number of young American and Canadian producers and directors got their start, including Sidney M. Cohen. After being unable to find national broadcasting work for several years in the wake of the quiz scandal (he did work locally in Los Angeles on television and radio), Barry finally bought a Los Angeles-area radio station (KKOP 93.5 FM, Redondo Beach, later renamed KFOX). In later interviews, he stated that he bought the station specifically because it would require him to have a license from the FCC, and that if the FCC would be willing to grant him a license, it would effectively show that he no longer was "tainted" by the game show scandals. Barry also owned a cable TV system in Redondo Beach. "Slowly," said a 1984 article in TV Guide which discussed game show hosts, "he began to receive calls: Would he fill in for five weeks on this game show? Yes. Of course." Barry appeared on a few local game shows in L.A. during this time (mostly on KTLA) and even played a newsman on the premiere of the mid-1960s TV series Batman. He did a guest reporter spot on the TV series The Addams Family. In 1969 he also became a host again, for ABC's The Generation Gap, replacing original host Dennis Wholey for the final weeks of its series.

Career revival

In 1969, Barry embarked on an idea which would launch his national comeback. He developed and produced a pilot for The Joker's Wild in association with Goodson-Todman Productions, emceed by Allen Ludden. CBS held off on picking up the series at first. Barry reworked the format and launched a local version in 1971 on Los Angeles' KTLA. The Joker's Wild made its national debut on CBS in 1972 with Barry hosting and producing the show (as Jack Barry Productions) until CBS cancelled it in 1975. Jack Barry Productions, meanwhile, produced Hollywood's Talking, Geoff Edwards' first game show, and Blank Check, hosted by veteran quiz and game host and announcer Art James. Even before Joker, however, Barry had displayed no loss of concurrent hosting and production skill, doing both with The Reel Game and a 1970s revival of Juvenile Jury.

Barry even brought Dan Enright back as The Joker's Wild's executive producer during its first network run, mentioning Enright at the end of the final CBS installment. The two renewed their working partnership full-time in 1976, launching Break the Bank, hosted by Tom Kennedy, on ABC. (When ABC cancelled the show despite decent ratings, Barry himself hosted and produce the show for weekly syndication during the 1976-77 season.)

In the fall of 1976, Barry sold reruns of The Joker's Wild's final CBS season to several stations, including New York WOR-TV and Los Angeles KTLA. These reruns rated highly enough that Barry and Enright produced new installments for first-run syndication beginning in 1977, with Barry again the host. The show was produced at the Chris Craft Studios of KCOP television in Hollywood (the series was seen in L.A. on KHJ-TV Channel 9, despite being produced at KCOP, and despite the test run of the final CBS season having aired on KTLA the season before). The new, syndicated Joker was a huge success, enough that it enabled Barry to reach back to his days as a children's program creator and host, launching in 1979 Joker! Joker!! Joker!!!, a weekly kids' version of The Joker's Wild in which children could win savings bonds (their parents played the bonus rounds).

The new Joker was so successful that Barry and Enright gambled on reviving a show formerly as tainted as they had been by the ancient quiz show scandal: Tic-Tac-Dough, with new host Wink Martindale, in 1978. From there, Barry & Enright in the 1970s and early 1980s developed and produced games like Bullseye, Play the Percentages, Hot Potato, and Hollywood Connection. They also produced several unsold pilots such as Decisions, Decisions. They even developed a resurrected Twenty-One, though this version never saw air. In due course, Barry & Enright Productions moved to film and series television production work.

Death

Barry, along with then-producer Ron Greenberg, eventually began grooming a successor host for The Joker's Wild, his periodic fill-in Jim Peck, and planned to retire from hosting in September 1984. (Joker! Joker!! Joker!!!, the children's version, lasted until 1981.) He did not live long enough to make that plan happen. On May 2, 1984, less than a month after completing Joker's seventh syndicated season and returning from a visit to his daughter in Europe, Barry suffered a massive cardiac arrest during a morning jog in Central Park. He died at Lenox Hill Hospital in New York City, after doctors were unable attempt to save his life. Barry's body was flown back to Southern California, where he is now laid to rest in Forest Lawn Memorial Park, Glendale, California. He was 66.

Enright, now the CEO of Barry & Enright Productions (which prompted the departure of longtime B&E director Richard S. Kline and producer Gary Cox, the latter joining Reg Grundy Productions), picked another quiz and game veteran, Bill Cullen, to host The Joker's Wild, and the show ran another two seasons. But when not enough stations signed up to pick up its 1986-87 season, The Joker's Wild -- which remade its host's and production company's fortunes, long after those fortunes were thought destroyed by scandal -- ceased production. The show would be the last one Cullen would host, however, he did appear a few more times (mostly on Pyramid) before retiring for good in 1988. Interestingly, a brand new studio set was to have been introduced for the 1986-87 season, which never materialized.

The Joker's Wild and Tic-Tac-Dough enjoyed brief revivals in the 1990s, produced by different entities entirely: The Joker's Wild ownership belonged to Jack Barry alone, even after he revived the old production partnership with Dan Enright and the show carried the Barry & Enright logo (as was the case with the Nipsey Russell Juvenile Jury revival from 1982); the 1990s revival was produced by former Barry & Enright producer Richard S. Kline, as Kline & Friends, with Barry's sons Jon and Douglas as co-executive producers for Jack Barry Productions. Enright produced the revived Tic-Tac-Dough under B&E. Twenty One returned to NBC for a brief run in 2000, this time produced by Phil Gurin & Fred Silverman.

Barry & Enright Productions based itself in Century City, California, after the partnership was revived, as had Jack Barry Productions. Sony Pictures Entertainment now owns the rights to the Barry & Enright and Jack Barry (solo) programs, and reruns of their shows have aired on GSN. Dan Enright died in 1992.