You won’t have to pretend to be sick to watch The Price is Right this time.
The long-standing reality TV show will be crossing over with CBS’s other three popular hits, Survivor, The Amazing Race, and Big Brother, sometime later this year, according to The Wrap. Host Drew Carey will hold three episodes in the evening, stepping away from the show’s daytime home that it has held for decades to bring viewers what they’ve wanted all along–their favorite reality shows clustered into one twisting, back-stabbing, and high-pressure conglomerate.
If a vision comes to mind of an island surveyed by an omnipresent voice on which individuals have to guess the cost of a boat to speed off to their next country, dissipate it. While that would most certainly make for good television, CBS was thinking of a more tame representation of their four gold-star programs.
There will be three episodes, whose air dates have yet to be either determined or simply announced. Half of the competitors will be ordinary citizens, but instead of being plucked from a crowd of cheerers and called to “come on down!” like before, they will be proven fans of Survivor, Big Brother, and The Amazing Race.
Whether or not Drew Carey will conduct a reality show aptitude test to prove these fans’ convictions is yet to be determined.
The other half of the new Price is Right contestants will be former stars of the three other shows, though not necessarily winners. CBS hopes that in their resurrection of their reality stars that viewers will feel a nostalgic pull for the old days and once the credits for Price roll, they’ll turn to bingeing 2000’s episodes of the other shows on Netflix.
No particular former contestants have been confirmed yet, but they will be separated into each episode by whichever show they originated from.
CBS will also be shipping over the hosts from the show triad–Phil Keoghan (The Amazing Race), Jeff Probst (Survivor), and Julie Chen (Big Brother)–to really drive the references home.
Whether or not CBS were inspired by the CW’s recent numerous crossover episodes of their superheroes, as the A.V. Club suggested in an article, it is true that crossovers are television gold mine stocked with rating rushes. When Barry Allen was paid a visit by the Arrow on The Flash last YEAR, the show saw its highest number of viewers for the whole season.
The same spike in ratings happened when the policemen of Chicago P.D. crossed paths with the cherished members of SVU in their crossover episode, and happened again when Bones and Sleepy Hollow went the same route.
Some might view this all as a stunt for CBS to veritably scrape in viewers for themselves, but that may be a misguided assumption. In 2015, the network continued its reign at the ratings top for its 29th consecutive year, specifically with its daytime shows taking the lead. The Price is Right, of course, is just but one of those spearhead ratings magnets, but while these three crossovers will certifiably boost the channel’s ratings, they will do more than that. They will bring to reality what America has been secretly craving for decades–a real life Hunger Games with a rambunctious live studio audience to boot.