Match Game is an American television panel game show that premiered on NBC in 1962 and has been revived several times over the course of the last six decades. The game features contestants trying to match answers given by celebrity panelists to fill-in-the-blank questions. Beginning with the CBS run of the 1970s, the questions are often formed as humorous double entendres.
The Match Game in its original version ran on NBC's daytime lineup from 1962 until 1969. The show returned with a significantly changed format in 1973 on CBS (also in daytime) and became a major success, with an expanded panel, larger cash payouts, and emphasis on humor. The CBS series, referred to on-air as Match Game 73 to startwith its title updated every new year, ran until 1979 on CBS, at which point it moved to first-run syndication (without the year attached to the title, as Match Game) and ran for three more seasons, ending in 1982. Concurrently with the weekday run, from 1975 to 1981, a once-a-week fringe time version, Match Game PM, was also offered in syndication for airing just before prime time hours.
The 1973 format would be used, with varying modifications, for all future revivals. Match Game returned to NBC in 1983 as part of Match Game-Hollywood Squares Hour, then had a daytime run on ABC in 1990 and another for syndication in 1998; each of these series lasted one season. It returned to ABC in a weekly prime time edition on June 26, 2016, running as an off-season replacement series. Production ended in 2019 (with some episodes held to 2020 and 2021), but ABC again revived the show in 2025.
All versions of the series were hosted by Gene Rayburn from 1963 until 1984. The 2025 version is presented by Martin Short.
The series was a production of Mark Goodson/Bill Todman Productions, along with its successor companies, and has been franchised around the world, notably as Blankety Blank in the UK and Blankety Blanks in Australia.
In 2013, TV Guide ranked the 1973–79 CBS version of Match Game as No. 4 on its list of the 60 greatest game shows ever. It was twice nominated for the Daytime Emmy Award for Outstanding Game Show, in 1976 and 1977.
1962–69, NBC
The Match Game premiered on December 31, 1962. Gene Rayburn was the host, and Johnny Olson served as announcer, for the series premiere, Arlene Francis and Skitch Henderson were the two celebrity panelists. The show was taped in Studio 8H at 30 Rockefeller Plaza in New York City, NBC's largest New York studio, which since 1975 has housed Saturday Night Live, among other shows. The show originally aired in black and white, but although the studio moved to color on June 24, 1963, it continued to air in black and white until it made the switch to color on April 5, 1965.
Both teams were given a question and each player privately wrote down their response, raising their hand when done. Then each player was asked individually to reveal their response. A team scored 25 points if two teammates matched answers or 50 points if all three contestants matched. The first team to score 100 points won $100 and played the audience match, which featured three survey questions (some of which, especially after 1963, featured a numeric-answer format, e.g., "we surveyed 50 women and asked them how much they should spend on a hat," a format similar to the one that was later used on Family Feud and Card Sharks). Each contestant who agreed with the most popular answer to a question earned the team $50, for a possible total of $450.
The questions used in the game were pedestrian in nature to begin: "Name a kind of muffin," "Write down one of the words to 'Row, Row, Row Your Boat' other than 'Row,' 'Your,' or 'Boat,'" or "John loves his _____." The humor in the original series came largely from the panelists' reactions to the other answers (especially on the occasional all-star episodes). In 1963, NBC canceled the series with six weeks left to be recorded. Question writer Dick DeBartolo came up with a funnier set of questions, like "Mary likes to pour gravy all over John's _____," and submitted it to Mark Goodson. With the knowledge that the show could not be canceled again, Goodson gave the go-ahead for the more risqué-sounding questions, a decision that caused a significant boost in ratings and an "un-cancellation" by NBC.
The Match Game consistently won its time slot from 1963 to 1966 and again from April 1967 to July 1968, with its ratings allowing it to finish third among all network daytime TV game shows for the 1963–64 and 1967–68 seasons (by the latter season, NBC was the dominant network in the game show genre, ABC was not as successful and CBS had mostly dropped out of the genre). NBC also occasionally used special episodes of the series as a gap-filling program in prime time if one of its movies had an irregular time slot. Although the series still did well in the ratings (despite the popularity of ABC's horror-themed soap opera Dark Shadows), it was canceled in 1969 along with other game shows in a major daytime programming overhaul, being replaced by Letters to Laugh-In which, although a spin-off of the popular primetime series Rowan & Martin's Laugh-In, ended in just three months, on December 26.
The Match Game continued through September 26, 1969, on NBC for 1,760 episodes, airing at 4:00 p.m. Eastern (3:00 p.m. Central), running 25 minutes due to a five-minute newscast slot. Since Olson split time between New York and Miami to announce The Jackie Gleason Show, one of the network's New York staff announcers (such as Don Pardo or Wayne Howell) filled in for Olson when he could not attend a broadcast.
On February 27, 1967, the show added a "telephone match" game, in which a home viewer and a studio audience member attempted to match a simple fill-in-the-blank question, similar to the 1970s' "head-to-head match". A successful match won a jackpot, which started at $500 and increased by $100 per day until won.
Very few episodes of the 1960s The Match Game survive (see episode status below).
Match Game 73–79 (1973–79, CBS)
In the early 1970s, CBS vice president Fred Silverman began overhauling the network's programming as part of what has colloquially become known as the rural purge. As part of this overhaul, the network reintroduced game shows, beginning in 1972. One of the first new offerings was The New Price Is Right, a radically overhauled version of the 1950s game show The Price Is Right. The success of The New Price Is Right prompted Silverman to commission more game shows. In the summer of 1973, Mark Goodson and Bill Todman took a similar approach in adapting The Match Game by reworking the show, moving it to Los Angeles, adding more celebrities, and increasing the amount of prize money that could be won. It was this show (along with the Bob Stewart game shows The $10,000 Pyramid, Three on a Match, Jackpot, and the Heatter-Quigley show Gambit) that reintroduced five-figure payouts for the first time since the quiz show scandals of the late 1950s.
The new version had Rayburn returning as the host and Olson returning as the announcer. The gameplay for this version had two solo contestants attempting to match the answers given by a six-celebrity panel. Richard Dawson was the first regular panelist. CBS News coverage of the Watergate hearings delayed the premiere one week from its slated date of June 25 to July 2.
The first week's panelists were Dawson, Michael Landon, Vicki Lawrence, Jack Klugman, Jo Ann Pflug, and Anita Gillette. Rayburn reassured viewers of the first week of CBS shows that "This is your old favorite, updated with more action, more money, and, as you can see, more celebrities." The first few weeks of the show were somewhat different from the rest of the run. At first, many of the questions fit into the more bland and innocuous mold of the earlier seasons of the original series. In addition, many of the frequent panelists on the early episodes were not regulars later in the series but had appeared on the 1960s version, including Klugman, Arlene Francis, and Bert Convy.
However, the double entendre in the question "Johnny always put butter on his _____" marked a turning point in the questions on the show. Soon, the tone of Rayburn's questions changed notably, leaving behind the staid topics that The Match Game had first disposed of in 1963 for more risqué humor. Celebrity panelists Brett Somers (Klugman's wife at the time) and Charles Nelson Reilly began as guest panelists on the program, with Somers brought in at the request of Klugman, who felt she would make a nice fit on the program. The chemistry between Somers and Reilly prompted Goodson–Todman and CBS to hire them as regular panelists, Somers remained on the show until 1982, while Reilly continued appearing through the 1983–84 and 1990–91 revivals, with a brief break in 1974–75 when Gary Burghoff, Nipsey Russell, and Rip Taylor substituted for him. Burghoff and Russell continued to appear as semi-regular panelists afterward.
Celebrity panelists appeared in week-long blocks, due to the show's production schedule. A number of celebrities, including Betty White, Dick Martin, Marcia Wallace, Bill Daily, Fannie Flagg, Elaine Joyce, Sarah Kennedy, Patti Deutsch, Mary Wickes, Bill Anderson, and Joyce Bulifant, were semi-regular panelists, usually appearing several times a year. Celebrity panelists also included personalities from other Goodson–Todman-produced game shows, such as The Price Is Rights Bob Barker, Anitra Ford, Janice Pennington, and Holly Hallstrom and Passwords Allen Ludden. The panelists were all seated in a strict order: The male guest panelist of the week, Somers, and Reilly usually sat in the top row from the viewer's left to right (occasionally a recurring panelist sat in for Somers or Reilly), and the female guest panelist of the week, Dawson (after 1978, a semi-regular male panelist), and a semi-regular female panelist (most frequently White, Flagg, Deutsch, Bulifant, or Wallace) occupied the bottom row.
Format Two contestants competed on each episode. On the CBS version, the champion was seated in the upstage (red circle) seat and the challenger (opponent) was seated in the downstage (green triangle) seat. On the syndicated versions, which had no returning champions, positions were determined by a backstage coin toss. The object was to match the answers of the six celebrity panelists to fill-in-the-blank statements.
The main game was played in two rounds (three on Match Game PM after the first season). The opponent was given a choice of two statements labeled either "A" or "B". Rayburn read the statement, and the six celebrities wrote their answers on index cards. After they finished, the contestant verbally gave an answer. Rayburn then asked the celebrities, one at a time beginning in the upper left-hand corner of the panel, to respond with their answers.
While early questions were similar to those from the NBC version (e.g., "Every morning, John puts [blank] on his cereal"), the questions quickly became more humorous and risqué. Comedy writer Dick DeBartolo (who stayed in New York), who had participated in the 1960s Match Game, contributed broader and saucier questions. Frequently, the statements were written with bawdy, double entendre answers in mind. One example was, "Did you catch a glimpse of that girl on the corner? She has the world's biggest [blank]."