Comebacks and Setbacks
Barris continued strongly until the mid-1970s, when ABC cancelled the Dating and Newlywed games. This left Barris with only one show, his weekly syndicated effort The New Treasure Hunt. But the success of The Gong Show in 1976 encouraged him to revive the Dating and Newlywed games, as well as adding the $1.98 Beauty Show to his syndication empire. He also hosted a short lived primetime variety hour for NBC from February to April 1978, called The Chuck Barris Rah-Rah Show, essentially a noncompetitive knock-off of Gong.
The empire crumbled again amid the burnout of another of his creations, the 1979–80 Three's a Crowd (in which three sets of wives and secretaries competed to see who knew more about their husbands/bosses). This show provoked protests from enraged feminist and socially conservative groups (two otherwise diametrically opposed viewpoints), who charged that the show deliberately exploited adultery, to advocate it as a social norm. Most stations dropped this show months before the season was over as a response to those criticisms. At the same time, Newlywed lost the sponsorships of Ford and Procter & Gamble and earned the resentment of Jackie Autry, whose husband and business partner Gene Autry owned the show's Los Angeles outlet and production base, KTLA, because of its supposedly highly prurient content. So strong were the feelings of the Autrys that Newlywed came close to being expelled from the KTLA facilities, but the show was discontinued by the syndicator before any action occurred. Gong Show and Dating Game also ended otherwise successful syndicated runs in 1980 because of the Three's a Crowd and Newlywed controversies, likely because stations were fearful of community and advertiser retribution on account of Barris' reputation.
During the winter of 1980, Barris attempted to rebuild by bringing back another game show that was not an original of his, Camouflage, in which contestants answered questions for the chance to locate a "hidden object" (such as a toaster) concealed within a cartoon-type drawing. Although a noncontroversial format, it lasted only a short time in syndication. By September 1980, for the first time in his company's history, Barris had no shows in production.
After a year's inactivity, Barris revived Treasure Hunt again in 1981 in partnership with the original 1950s version's producer, Budd Granoff, who had become his business partner (the show itself was created by its original host, Jan Murray). Unlike with the 1970s version of Treasure Hunt, Barris did not have direct involvement with the production of the show itself. This revival, a five-day-a-week strip, lasted only one year.
Barris, by this time living in France, came back again in 1984 and formed Barris Industries. He formed a distributor arm called Bel-Air Program Sales (later Barris Program Sales) and an ad-sales barter called Clarion Communications (later Barris Advertising Sales). After a week-long trial of The Newlywed Game on ABC in 1984 (with Dating Game emcee Jim Lange), Barris produced the daily Newlywed Game (titled The New Newlywed Game) in syndication from 1985 to 1989, with original host Eubanks (and in 1988, comedian Paul Rodriguez). The Dating Game returned to syndication the next year for a three year run (the first year hosted by Elaine Joyce, and the next two hosted by Jeff MacGregor). The Gong Show would also return for one season in 1988, now hosted by "True" Don Bleu. All of those shows (except for the one week trial run of Newlywed on ABC) aired in syndication, not on the networks.
Chuck Barris sold his shares of Barris Industries, Inc. in 1987 to Burt Sugarman and left to move back to France and was no longer directly involved in his media company. In 1988, Barris Industries acquired the Guber-Peters Company. On September 7, 1989, Barris Industries was renamed as the Guber-Peters Entertainment Company. After the shows' runs ended, Sony Corporation acquired Guber-Peters Entertainment (formerly Barris Industries) for $200 million on September 29, 1989, a day after Sony Corporation of Japan acquired Columbia Pictures Entertainment. The sale was completed on November 9, 1989 after Sony's acquisition of Columbia Pictures Entertainment a day earlier. Sony revived Dating and Newlywed from 1996 to 1999. Sony also revived The Gong Show in 1998, this time as Extreme Gong, a Game Show Network (GSN) original production. Three's a Crowd would be revived as All New Three's a Crowd, which, like Extreme Gong, was a GSN original. A few years after Extreme Gong ended, Sony planned to revive the show again under its classic name and format for The WB Television Network, but this version was never realized. Sony and MTV Networks' Comedy Central collaborated on a fourth Gong Show revival as The Gong Show with Dave Attell in 2008; this did sell and aired on Comedy Central from July to September 2008.
One more attempt at reviving an old game show that was not his own originally resulted in an unsold pilot of the 1950s-era game Dollar a Second, hosted by Bob Eubanks. It had at least one showing on GSN, and has since become part of the collector/trader's circuit. Another unsold pilot was called Comedy Courtroom.
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