Word: griffin
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With the death of Elizabeth Murray at age 66 on Sunday, America lost one of its smartest, slyest, most exuberant painters. Merv Griffin will get longer eulogies this week. But trust me, when The Wheel of Fortune is done spinning, she's the one who will matter a great deal more. And it's precisely at this moment, when so much of the fantasy offered to us by mass culture is calculated industrial product, in formulations arrived at by Hollywood or by whichever multinational is fine-tuning the next big video game, that her work feels especially important. She stood...
...Carson was TV's aloof and somewhat imposing arbiter of taste, Griffin, who died on Sunday at 82, was the welcoming, always enthusiastic showbiz uncle, who seemed to want everyone he brought on his show to become a star. He laughed at their jokes, gushed at their stories, joined them in songs. Like that other great TV natural of the era, Bob Barker, Griffin perfected an authentic, unironic, people-friendly manner that was seemingly impervious to the winds of change...
...Griffin had been a big-band singer (he had a hit with "I've Got a Lovely Bunch of Coconuts") and host of the game show Play Your Hunch before getting his first TV talk show on NBC in 1962. That lasted only a year, but in 1965 he returned with a syndicated show for Westinghouse. Though hardly cutting-edge, it had its appealing quirks. Griffin hired Arthur Treacher, the veteran British character actor, as his announcer. In his plummy British accent, Treacher would introduce Merv with a flourish at the start of each show: "And now, here...
...Griffin's show moved from syndication to CBS (where he challenged Carson head-to-head for a short time), then back to syndication, where he became a daytime staple until 1986. His guests were an eclectic mix of singers, comics, authors, occasional politicians - and Orson Welles, his favorite guest, whom he had on nearly 50 times. His gushy style - leaning heavily in on his guests, responding with a fervent "oooohhh" for each innocuous comment - inspired one of Rick Moranis's great running impressions on SCTV. It was parody borne of affection, not derision...
...Griffin was far more than a TV personality, however; he was a creator and entrepreneur who understood television as well as anyone in the medium's history. In 1964 he came up with the idea for Jeopardy! - a game show that supplied the answers and asked contestants to come up with the questions. (A jack-of-all-trades, he even wrote the theme music for the "Final Jeopardy Answer" as well.) A decade later he invented his own version of hangman, creating the most successful game show in TV history, Wheel of Fortune. As usual, his involvement with the show...