Rant #1,692: Nothng But the Truth

This was a pretty blah weekend, with nothing much happening of note in my neck of the woods.

That horrible Orlando, Fla., massacre aside, this was a weekend that my family and I basically geared up for next weekend, when we are hosting Father's Day for our families with a barbecue.

We were busy this weekend preparing for the occasion, and once we finally sat down and relaxed, we watched things like the Yankees' annual Oldtimer's Day celebration (the 70th anniversary event) and my wife watched another group of episodes of "Game of Thrones" (she is almost all caught up).

I have to be truthful about it, I watched "To Tell the Truth." A marathon of the show ran on the Buzzr network in preparation for this week's debut of a new version of the show on ABC. More about that later.

This is one of the classic game shows that is part of the Mark Goodson-Bill Todman arc of such shows that dominated TV in the 1950s, 1960s and into the 1970s, including "What's My Line," "I've Got a Secret" and "The Price Is Right."

All of these shows are basically simple "parlor" games made into the TV game show format.

For "To Tell the Truth," which started life a few months before I was born in 1956 as "Nothing But the Truth" in its pilot episode but then immediately changed to the name we know it by, the format is pretty simple.

A four-person panel has to choose which one of the three people is "telling the truth," usually about their occupation or something they have done that warrants attention.

Whether it is a female bowler, someone who runs an exotic food company, or a journalist who won a Pulitzer Price--all topics covered on the shows I watched--the panel has to decide which of the three is telling the truth. Sometimes it is kind of obvious who is the real one, other times, it isn't, and that is the fun of the show.

And the panelists are just about as much fun as the people they are choosing from. This show was so popular that everyone from Johnny Carson to Dick Van Dyke to Sally Ann Howes, Orson Bean, Tom Poston, Peggy Cass and Kitty Carlisle all manned this panel, and did it in such a polite, genial way ... you see that the way people handled themselves in the 1950s and 1960s, in particular, were so different from today's in-your-face "entertainment."

And I almost forgot to talk about the host. Bud Collyer was the long-time host of the show (in the pilot, it was hosted by newsman Mike Wallace!), and he runs a by-the-books ship here, never veering very much from the script. Collyer, who voiced Superman on radio, knows how to follow a script, and is often seen actually reading from one on the show.

Yes, the show is a poor stepchild of the king of such shows, "What's My Line," but it has its own personality too, and it was very, very popular when it was on CBS for years.

It also ran in syndication for a number of years with a variety of hosts, and now, ABC is going to run a new version of the show this week.

From what little I have seen, it will be missing the charm of the original, again, more in your face than interesting. In this social media world, where the littlest achievement is paraded around the Internet as if it were monumental, the producers will have to come up with people who have done stuff that nobody knows about, and it will be harder than you think it will be to find such people in this world where everyone knows everything about everybody.

And again, from what little I have seen, it will be charmless, more in your face, and not as reserved as the original was, but in this anything goes age, I guess that is how it will be.

More importantly, when it debuts on Tuesday with Anthony Anderson as its host, it will be the second game show--joining "The Price Is Right"--to have a least one new episode on the air in seven consecutive decades.

Not bad for basically what amounts to a parlor game, not bad at all.