What's My Line? (1950)

Directed by

Paul Alter

Genre

panel game

Country

United States

Length

1 season, 876 episodes

Rated

TV-G

Rating

7.0 of 10 from 29 voters

Elsewhere

IMDb

How it feels

Celebrity panelists question contestants to guess their jobs. Once a week a famous person appears as a mystery guest and the panel is blindfolded. The show ran for many years and won awards.

lightheartedplayfulnostalgiccleverwarmbriskintriguingclassic

What happens

What's My Line? is a panel game show that originally ran in the United States, between 1950 and 1967, on CBS, originally in black and white and later in color, with subsequent American revivals. The game uses celebrity panelists to question contestants in order to determine their occupation. The majority of the contestants were from the general public, but there was one weekly celebrity "mystery guest" for whom the panelists were blindfolded. The series is on the list of longest-running American primetime network television game-shows. Originally moderated by John Charles Daly and most frequently with regular panelists Dorothy Kilgallen, Arlene Francis, and Bennett Cerf, What's My Line? won three Emmy Awards for Best Quiz or Audience Participation Show in 1952, 1953, and 1958 and the Golden Globe for Best TV Show in 1962. More than 700 episodes exist as kinescope recordings, the prevailing recording medium for recording live television until the 1960s emergence of videotape. Many early episodes were lost due to budgetary limitations from 1950 and 1952. All episodes from July 1952 to September 1967 were preserved in the archives of producers Mark Goodson and Bill Todman, but by 1975, some of the episodes had been lost. After CBS cancelled the series in 1967, it returned the following year in a syndicated version for local television stations that committed to airing it five days a week. This syndicated version was broadcast until 1975 and was hosted by Wally Bruner and later by Larry Blyden. There have been a dozen international versions, radio versions, and a live stage version. Revivals in the United States have been proposed several times, but all failed to go past the planning stages. New episodes have not been created for American television since December 12, 1974. In 2013, TV Guide ranked What's My Line? ninth on its list of the 60 greatest game shows ever and Time ranked it as one of the 100 "All-Time" TV shows ever. (from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA)

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