I Miss the Real The Price is Right

I am currently watching a friend’s dog while she’s away on vacation. It was presented to me as a pretty easy job: Stop by a few times a day, let the dog out to do its business, feed it, make sure it has water and then accept with a smile on my face the chintzy gifts people invariably bring back from vacation as a thank you.

As it turns out, the task has become my own, private Vietnam, and her dog is playing the role of the man in the black pajamas. The hound, presented to me as housebroken, pisses and shits at will. If I spend more than four hours away, I am guaranteed to come home to at least urine, and more than six hours means there will be a scoop of chocolate on top. Where I come from, an animal that’s housebroken would rather die than expel itself upon the rug. Not taking a leak for four hours doesn’t make you potty trained: It just means there was something good on TV. As if that weren’t enough, the dog is a rescue that was savagely beaten by its previous, male owner, so every time I walk in and am greeted by sewage, it cowers in fear, expecting me to kick its two remaining teeth in. So I have to spend the next ten minutes telling it what a pretty girl it is, that I’m not mad at it and that we can both move forward amicably with our lives.

What does any of this have to do with The Price is Right? I left the television on overnight to keep the dog company and, upon showing up this morning (just in time to clean up three separate piles of shit of varying colors, scents and consistencies. It was like a wine tasting), I was greeted by the familiar theme song of my favorite game show of all time. Immediately, my head swirled with childhood memories of Bob Barker and his life partner Rod Roddy entertaining me every time I skipped school or spent Christmas break with my grandma as she fed me Chiclets while chain smoking Pall Malls. I sat down, eager to view anything that wasn’t solid brown in color.

It had been years since I last saw the show. The announcer who replaced Rod (who went on the wrong side of the dirt in 2003) sounded like a reasonable facsimile thereof, and Drew Carey, despite looking more and more like a militant lesbian by the day, had an affable charm on the job.

Still, like a pretty girl with short hair, something wasn’t right. The Price is Right ended for everyone when Bob Barker left it in 2007. Couldn’t CBS have had the decency to change the name? Maybe to something catchy yet honest, like The One Show on Television Watched in Both Nursing Homes and Frat Houses? When you break up with a woman, you don’t ask your next girlfriend to put on a wig and answer to your ex’s name: You accept her as someone new and different. (Hopefully, one of those differences is having much bigger tits.) CBS needs to stop masturbating to memories of past love and move on.