Why The Hollywood Squares was the Best TV Game Show of All Time

I've always enjoyed the TV game show The Hollywood Squares, going way back to the first version in 1965, which ran until 1981. The first shows were shown on CBS with the pilot hosted by Bert Parks and the first celebrities featured were Cliff Arguette, (doing his famous "Charley Weaver" comedy routine), Rose Marie, Wally Cox, Morey Amsterdam, Jim Backus, Robert Q Lewis and movie actress Vera Miles. These celebs stayed with the show even after NBC took over and continued airing the show for many years. Other guests taking over the squares including the center square at different intervals... Bert Parks was replaced by Peter Marshall and stayed until 1981 and became the most popular host on TV during all that time.

The most coveted spot was center square and in 1968 Paul Lynde took that chair and gave the show its funniest lines. He even won the Emmy twice for these playful performances

Over the years many other stars and quasi stars appeared and became regulars, including, Vincent Price, Jonathon Winters, Roddy Mcdowall, Joan Rivers, Rose Marie, Sandy Duncan, Charo, Kaye Ballard, George Gobel and Florence Henderson as well as many more during each incarnation of the show.

Though most of the stars were famous comedians and the questions legitimate, the stars were given the questions in advance so they could provide bluffs and jokes in order to be humorous when the contestant called their name....Humor was the key to the popularity of this show

Basically the game was very simple...two contestants play Tic Tac Toe in order to win money and prizes.... The board was a vertical set of 3x3 open faced boxes with a desk in each square...at each desk sat a celebrity...The contestants played like they would a regular Tic Tac Toe game... one played the O's the other played the X's, using whatever strategy needed to complete the winning line after the question was asked to the celebrity... it was up to the contestant to figure out if the celebrity gave them the right answer or was bluffing...if the contestant guessed right he or she was given the coveted O or X....sometimes it really was hard to tell, other times you just knew it couldn't be the correct answer and funny thing, sometimes those answers turned out to be right...That was the fun of watching this game show. And, the stars were not required to give the right answer even if they knew it...bluffing and joking were the choice the stars had and the contestant could only get his point by figuring out just what was right or wrong or a bluff. The winner was the contestant that finished the first line of X's or O's.

The show was on primarily in the day time until 1980 while it was being filmed in Las Vegas, thereby affording an incredible array of new stars to grace the board...the prizes weren't astronomical but pretty good and increased when the show was finally put on the air at night during that year.

Then, in 1998, a syndicated version returned with Whoopi Goldberg as producer and sat in the center stage square, with Tom Bergeron as host... other comics joined the squares, such as Caroline Rhea, (Sabrina the Teenage Witch,) and Bruce Vilanch, (a comedy writer), as regulars...comedians galore graced those boxes with their witty repartee and sometimes pretty bawdy one liners and crazy wrong guesses....They even had theme shows and special guests and though the prizes got bigger and bigger, with winnings as high as $75,000 and great ratings, for some reason, in 2002, the ratings plummeted and there was a shake up behind the scenes...alas, Whoopi left, as did Bruce Vilanch and Caroline Rhea along with the other producers...Henry Winkler took over as executive producer with rotating center squares, such as Ellen Degeneres and funny man Jeffrey Tambor...Though the major overhaul was successful at first it still lacked the personality of the 1998-2002 Whoopi & Friends era and some say this new rotating center square prevented the show from developing that true individual personality it had in the past making it seem inconsistent and the successful ratings never came back... Many local stations took the show out of its prime time slot airing it during the daytime line-up until finally the plug was pulled for good in 2004..at least for now.

If you were a big fan like me, you can find reruns of the show on some cable networks, (Comedy Network is one), and they even show some of the very older episodes going way, way back - still as funny as ever. I would love to see a remake once again but doubt it will happen. Until then, if you get a chance to watch repeats of The Hollywood Squares, give yourself a good laugh by tuning in.