Guys to Ogle, Come On Down!

There was an entertainment news item last week that, from what I can tell, didn’t get nearly the attention that it should have.

For forty years, old people and people stuck at home during sick days have stared with glazed eyes at what might be the longest-running game show ever: The Price is Right.

You know the format. A few members of a crowd full of cheering people are told to, “Come on Down!” so that they can guess the prices of things like boxes of cereal or living room furniture or sports cars all presented by ladies smiling mega-watt smiles and gesturing sweepingly at the prizes behind them.

And it’s always ladies. Forty years’ worth of shows, two full-time hosts, a switch from half-hour to hour-long format, and not a single male model has had the opportunity to don his best formalwear, load up his hair with product, and sharpen up his presentational gestures to be a “Showcase Model.”

But, as Bob Dylan once said, “The Times, They Are A-Changin’.”

CBS announced last week plans to begin the search for The Price is Right’s first male Showcase Model and to broadcast said search on the web via the game show’s website and YouTube, with the finalists to be announced during the game show itself in late September and the winner of the contest beginning their gig on the show in October.

This may not be history-making news, but it is kinda a big deal. We're talking about forty years of men being excluded here, and now it's ending in a very 2012 way--with a reality show happening online.

The most shocking thing, though, is that it's taken this long for someone to realize what a good idea male models on this show would be. 

Think about it for a minute. The Price is Right is the number one program on Daytime television, as far as numbers of viewers goes. It stands to reason that a chunk of those viewers are going to be female who'd like someone to ogle. It's certainly not news to the entertainment industry that there's money to be made from putting a camera on handsome men, and there's not a woman in the world who can deny that she likes to look at a pretty face.

We could certainly try to, but....

Yeah, we'd be lying.

And what about Magic Mike? Sure, Seth MacFarlane's movie,Ted was the top-earning movie on their shared opening weekend, but not by much. Not trying to appeal to female viewers, even in something as simple as this is as good as leaving money on the table.

Not to mention that former host Bob Barker might've had a harder time sexually harassing male models.

Whatever the reason CBS has for finally putting male models on the show, it's a pretty interesting step, and it'll be exciting to see how it's received by the show's Daytime audience and how the webseries preliminaries are handled.

More information on the model search, including eligibility requirements and casting applications can be found here.