After spending a couple of hours digging around YouTube yesterday, I posed a question to my friends on Google+ and Facebook about just what it is that makes Aspies (people with Asperger’s Syndrome or high-functioning autism) love The Price is Right so much. I got a variety of interesting responses, but I think I’ve been able to come up with my own explanation:
1) It’s a huuuuuuuuge body of work (6000+ episodes, more than all series of Star Trek, Doctor Who, The Simpsons, Buffy, and BSG combined). It’s also an extremely detail-oriented show with quite a lot of “moving parts.” Consequently, there’s a lot of stuff for Aspie brains to feast on: thousands of prizes and their prices, 80+ different pricing games (and the order in which those games are played), music cues, small set changes, hairstyle changes, even differences in the announcer’s spiel at the start of the show. Just like if we’re reading the phonebook or a street atlas, Aspies will never get bored classifying and cataloguing every detail of the show. All of this has led to one hell of a Price is Right fandom on the Internet, centered around golden-road.net, the unofficial fan forum. Many TPIR fans have uploaded their VHS recordings of old episodes (what young Aspie didn’t record TPIR every day to watch after coming home from school?), with the result that there are now upwards of 100 episodes from the Barker era available in their entirety and for free on YouTube. Bob Barker and some of TPIR’s staff have expressed admiration for the TPIR superfans at least since the early 1990s, calling them “Loyal Friends and True” and welcoming them to attend tapings. A couple of them have even gone on to work on the show. You can see the results of the devotion of the “Loyal Friends and True,” and their sheer Aspie-ness, in the “Price is Right Timeline” hosted over on golden-road.net (http://golden-road.net/faq/index.php/The_Price_Is_Right_Timeline). This 118,000 word document has chronicled every event and change in the history of the show, week by week. If you want to know exactly when the asterisks on the Showcase podiums changed color for the first time, you had better believe that information will be there.
2) In addition to being both vast and highly detailed, The Price is Right is also super-logical and highly routine. Its structure (six items up for bids, six pricing games, two Showcase Showdowns, one Showcase) hasn’t changed at all since 1975, and there have been only two hosts and four permanent announcers since the show’s debut in 1972. TPIR has a legendary consistency that feels very comfortable to the Aspie’s mind. Somewhat characteristically, TPIR fans have been highly resistant to any changes that the show has made, and have reacted with fervor to make Comic Book Guy from “The Simpsons” proud. Angry comments on golden-road.net have followed even the smallest changes on the show, especially when Drew Carey replaced Bob Barker as host and producer Roger Dobkowitz (known to be very sympathetic to the hardcore fanbase) was fired in 2008. Numerous changes have followed during Drew’s tenure as host, nearly all of which have riled up the Loyal Friends and True. In nearly every show recap on golden-road.net, at least one fan complains about something minor on the show that he doesn’t like—this could be anything from Drew flubbing a pricing-game explanation to a slightly different font used on the Plinko board—and threatens to stop watching the show for good. (Of course, he’s back on the forum with another recap the very next day.) Sometimes the complaining can be insufferable, but it speaks to a very Aspie desire for the show not to change, for the routine to stay the same, and for The Price is Right to always be The Price is Right of our childhood.
