Drew Carey gets so, so happy as Price Is Right contestant nails Showcase bid
Carey declared Patrice Masse's win "the best Showcase bid in Price Is Right history"—which might be him throwing shade at at least one past winner
Aux News Drew Carey
Few game show events on TV have a wider range of possible wrong answers than the climactic Showcase on The Price Is Right. For those of you who didn’t spend enough time home sick from school during their childhoods, the long-running game show’s final challenge works like this: Two contestants are presented with multiple prizes, with a value adding up somewhere in the five-digit range. Each then bids what they think the right price for the package is, and the one who’s nearest (WITHOUT GOING OVER, a very specifically conditioned part of our brain now screams) gets the loot. (If you’re within $250 of the actual value, you get both.) It might not be as hard as some of Jeopardy!’s nastier brain stumpers, but with a range of possible answers this massive, it’s still damn hard to do with any hope of accuracy. (In recent seasons of the show, contestants pull off the Double Showcase win only about 2 percent of the time.)
All of which is to help explain why the excitement is goddamn palpable in the above clip from today’s episode of the show, when Canadian contestant Patrice Masse ventures a bid of $39,500 for a trip/car combo… and is revealed to have been off by only a single buck. Host Drew Carey certainly loves it, letting the moment build with the energy of a guy who lives for these moments (and Phish shows, and nothing else), revealing just how cleanly Masse has crushed it.
Carey goes so far as to declare Masse’s bid “the best Showcase bid in Price Is Right history,” which is fascinating in so far as Carey has been there when someone got a (much more obscure) number exactly right, once upon a time: The incident in 2008 in which retired weatherman Terry Kneiss brought the show to a screeching halt because his bid of $23,743 was right on, well, the money. Given that Carey and his producers were convinced Kneiss had been helped by an obsessive TPiR fan in the audience—claims Kneiss always denied, saying that he and his wife were amateur statisticians who simply tracked the prices of prizes on the show for months—it might help explain why Carey goes out of his way to say that Masse’s win today came with “absolutely no help from anybody in the audience, by the way.”
Anyway, that’s us descending into one of our daily Game Show History Nerd holes; the upshot is the sheer joy on Masse’s face as he realizes exactly what he’s pulled off, and the answering delight that infuses very ounce of Carey’s body.
36 Comments
watched it today as it aired. pure joy.
Don’t care that much about TPIR but this is the first time I’ve seen that Phish clip and man that was hilarious.
The Kneiss bid was better, regardless of whether or not she got help. Help from the audience is allowed.
Shade or not, I loved Carey’s restrained WTF reaction.Truly genuine guy who spent well over a million dollars, maybe more, on meals for the WGA writers during the strike.
The worst header image in history for the best bid.
Oh man, now I need to know more about the drama behind the guy who got it exactly right. People breaking game shows is a weird niche interest of mine, ever since I heard about the dude who memorized the Press Your Luck board. There’s gotta be podcasts or video essays on this topic, right?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perfect_Bid:_The_Contestant_Who_Knew_Too_Much“Perfect Bid: The Contestant Who Knew Too Much” is a documentary on it. I watched it on Netflix, but I have no idea if it’s still on there since that was several years ago now.
At least the video was tagged more accurately.No he didn’t get it right on like the guy who picked lotto number getting it on the nose, but it terms of “close”, that is the “closet” someone can come.
Hold on. If I’m understanding it correctly, the first guy that got it exactly right did so because he and his wife had studied the game and prices of things over a large period of time and that’s how he was able to guess the exact price? Honestly, that’s just as impressive as this random guess being within a dollar.
More so.
He was a liar. Watch “The Perfect Bid”, it’s a documentary and free in many places. It explains it all. A SUPER-fan Math Teacher was the guy with the Awesome math brain. He was sitting next to the guy’s wife in the audience and told her the exact amount (he tried to get the to round it down he says, but she yelled the number to her husband too quick). It’s a pretty captivating story for anyone who’s a fan of The Price is Right.
I just dropped everything and watched Perfect Bid on YouTube; it’s fantastic! I could watch a 10-hour cut of that …
they believe that somebody in the audience managed to signal the answer…I don’t think Carey would say that unless he really thought it was the case.
I hope they gave an extra parting gift to sista girl for only being 500 off.
Maybe I’m missing something because I only saw the short insta clip, but he says at the end the guy ended up with 80 some grand total for the two and it looked like the other contestant bet 6 something on hers? So she was like 35k off? I mean if you’re gonna lose I guess it’s less painful to lose miserably knowing you had no shot in hell.
No, she was only off by $500. The other contestant beat her by being off by $1.
He won the lifetime supply of frozen chicken by Chickenman!
I wonder, do people still remember the Drew Carey show anymore? feels like he might be mainly remembered as the Price is Right Host who took over for Barker (assuming people still remember Barker). I assume the old show is streaming somewhere but i dunno.
Unfortunately, the show is a music rights nightmare, so it’s never been on streaming. I loved it, personally. It’s the main reason why I’m STILL not used to skinny Drew.
do you mean Jeff Winger’s lawyer boss
I can still sing the theme song.
Which one?
The “Cleveland Rocks” one sucked.
Drew Carey Show. Moon over Parma bring my love to me tonight, got her to Cleveland underneath the silv’ry light…
Moon over Parma or Cleveland Rocks?
Moon over Parma. I vaguely remember Cleveland Rocks, but I think I wasn’t watching regularly then.
I think the old show is continuously streaming on Google TV.
There’s an archive website that has the the entire series that you could download.
I don’t know about streaming but I swear I’ve seen it on one of those free OTA channels. I can’t remember which one tho whether its Laff, Rewind, or Antenna TV. Maybe check you local guides if you ever want to watch it.
I’m remembering it now. He was a different sort of lead character. I was interested to see where his career would go. Guess I’m a bit disappointed that he ended up on a game show.
forgot, there’s also the American version of Who’s Line Is It Anyway that he hosted
I wouldn’t be surprised if nowadays when most people think of his pre-Price of Right work their first response would be his hosting of Whose Line is it Anyway? Would make sense given it’s been on continuous reruns, where the Drew Carey show hasn’t.
I probably saw every episode a few times because it was on between Simpsons reruns after school. Looking back it was a pretty creative show.
that’s mostly how i remember it – in syndication, something to have on in the background while correcting papers or whatever. usually with something similar like King of Queens or Seinfeld on afterwards. certainly an above average sitcom
This feels legit. Plenty of contestants make bids with a round number XX500. So I’m not surprised that Drew gave a genuine reaction. As for that one contestant that got the bid exactly right, it does deserve to have an asterisk in the books. I’m sure Drew and the showrunners were suspect, because Drew had no reaction to what seemed to be a historic bid.Not sure to what degree they enforce the rules to ensure that audiences members don’t look up prices, but if a super fan helped him and gave him signals for the price, I think it’s the equivalent of counting cards. Not exactly cheating, but just straight up frowned upon.
Is he evolving into Ed McMahon? When will he grow the fake giant check used to trick unsuspecting people into thinking they’ve won the Publisher’s Clearinghouse Sweepstakes? That’s right, the check was like an anglerfish lure, he fed on the living to stay alive and when junk mail fell it cut off his food supply. Now his unholy spirit has entered Drew Carey, probably when he let his psychic guard down taking hallucinogens and enjoying Phish at the Sphere. He’s probably moved up to email scams to find victims so keep an eye on your inbox.