Mark Goodson

Producer and entertainer

• Born: January 24, 1915
• Birthplace: Sacramento, California
• Died: December 18, 1992
• Place of death: New York, New York

Goodson had an indelible impact on the television landscape through the quiz shows he produced with his business partner, Bill Todman. Together they created What’s My Line, The Price Is Right, Match Game, Password, and other popular game shows.

Early Life

Mark Goodson (GOOD-suhn) was born on January 24, 1915, in California. His parents were Abraham Ellis and Fannie Goodson, a Jewish couple who emigrated from Russia early in the twentieth century. Mark Goodson described his upbringing during the Great Depression as a time of incredible hardship for his impoverished family. Anxiety about becoming poor again troubled Goodson for the rest of his life.

As a boy Goodson appeared in local Sacramento theater productions, sometimes finding paying work as part of a stock company. His parents forbade him to pursue an acting career, however, and after his high school graduation in 1932, he enrolled at the University of California, Berkeley, to study economics and political science. He continued acting on the side in student productions.

After graduating cum laude in 1937, Goodson worked as a disc jockey at San Francisco station KJBS. His parents’ ambitions for him to attend law school were abandoned. In 1939, the Mutual Broadcasting Company hired him to work as a newscaster and program director at its San Francisco affiliate, KFRC.

Life’s Work

Goodson’s illustrious career in game shows began at KFRC in 1939, when he came up with a concept for a show in which participants tried to pop balloons at range and collect the prizes inside. Goodson called it Pop the Question. In 1941, Goodson moved on to a bigger market, New York, serving as an announcer on soap operas and game shows such as The Jack Dempsey Sports Quiz and The Answer Man. That same year he married Bluma Neveleff. He produced several dramas, soaps, and a 1944 program aimed at selling war bonds, The Treasury Salute. Goodson’s fateful job, however, involved working on a game show called Battle of the Boroughs, which introduced him to a writer, Bill Todman, who would collaborate with Goodson on many of his great successes. In 1946, they formed their own company, Goodson-Todman Productions.

Their first collaboration was Winner Take All, in a quiz-show format that Goodson created and Todman tested and marketed; the Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS) bought the show in 1946, and it premiered in 1948. The Goodson-Todman partnership continued in this vein for decades, with Goodson focusing on the creative development of new formats and Todman handling the business side. Winner Take All was the first show to set two players against each other in direct competition for a prize and the first show to invite winning contestants to return for another show until they lost. Goodson and Todman worked together on four other radio shows: Hit the Jackpot, Spin to Win, Rate Your Mate, and Time’s a Wastin’.

Radio quiz shows faced a difficult transition into television, where contestants were thought to look static and uninteresting. Goodson and Todman changed all that in 1949 when they came up with the concept for their famous show What’s My Line? The format involved a celebrity panel attempting to guess the occupation of a guest, who often had an unusual job; prize money was small (fifty dollars), but panelists and guests were paid lump sums for appearing, although these amounts were not publicized. The low-payout format was common among the game shows Goodson produced throughout his career, and his success as a packager of shows came from their lucrative combination of small budgets and massive popularity. The show premiered on CBS on February 1, 1950, under the title Occupation Unknown but was soon renamed What’s My Line?

What’s My Line? solved the difficulties of television presentation through its use of celebrities and its elegant style. Participants appeared in formalwear (although the clothes became slightly less formal over the course of the show’s run) and exchanged witty remarks in the form of questions about the guest’s occupation. The show popularized one of the panelists’ frequent questions, “Is it bigger than a breadbox?” The show was an incredible success, even spawning a radio version in 1953. The television format ran from 1950 to September 3, 1967, becoming the longest-running prime-time game show in television history.

Goodson created many other game shows while What’s My Line? ran on CBS, and by 1956 Goodson-Todman Productions had become the largest producer of game shows in the United States. The company created the game shows It’s News to Me, The Name’s the Same, Two for the Money, Judge for Yourself, and I’ve Got a Secret and the dramas The Rebel, Jefferson Drum, Branded, and The Web. The company produced several twists on the What’s My Line? format, including The Name’s the Same (in which panelists tried to guess the strange names of ordinary people) and the well-known To Tell the Truth (1956), which featured a panel of celebrities questioning three contestants who claimed to be the same person. To Tell the Truth’s host would ask the show’s famous catchphrase “Will the real [name] please stand up?”

In 1956, Goodson produced his enduring show The Price Is Right for the National Broadcasting Company (NBC). It was a success both with advertisers and with audiences, testing contestants’ consumer acumen by asking them to guess the cost of featured items. One of Goodson’s writers, Bob Stewart, came up with the concept after watching an auctioneer at work through his office window. The format of The Price Is Right was altered in 1972, and it continued to run decades later.

Later hits for Goodson-Todman productions included Password (1961), The Match Game (1962), and Family Feud (1976). Goodson apparently disliked Todman’s stake in the business, claiming Goodson’s shows no longer needed Todman to market them. Nevertheless, the partnership did not end until Todman’s death in 1979. Afterward the company was renamed Mark Goodson Productions.

Goodson’s writers and producers were responsible for the original concepts for most of his shows, from What’s My Line? onward; however, Goodson refined their concepts into the forms that became popular on television. He described a rigorous internal testing process in which writers and producers collaborated to iron out potential problems in each new format.

On December 18, 1992, Goodson died of pancreatic cancer while at his home in New York. He was seventy-seven years old. The rights to the Goodson-Todman shows were later sold to FremantleMedia, a large European television producer.

Significance

Goodson’s influential work in television was recognized with a Lifetime Achievement in Daytime Television Emmy in 1989. He was appointed to the American Film Institute’s board of directors, where he served from 1975 to 1992, and he was named a trustee at the Museum of Broadcast Communications. While critics have accused Goodson’s quiz shows of having a negative effect on the television landscape, there is no doubt that the public enjoyed them. According to Goodson’s obituary in The New York Times, there had not been a week of television without a Goodson show on the air since 1950.

Bibliography

Carter, Bill. “Mark Goodson, Game-Show Inventor, Dies at Seventy-Seven.” The New York Times, December 19, 1992. This concise obituary sums up Goodson’s life and career with fairness and brevity.

Goodson, Mark. “If I Stood Up Earlier . . . ” The New York Times, January 13, 1991. Fascinating article by Goodson on his encounter with blacklisting.

Peers, Martin. “All American Buys Out Goodson.” Daily Variety, April 10 1996. A short news piece article detailing the sale of the rights to Goodson shows.