![]() ![]() In that sense they were forerunners of Will and Grace, the gay man and his gal pal with a bitchy, loving disregard for each other. Somers was the middle-aged man-hungry “dumb brunette” with the lefty chicken scrawl, Reilly, the fussbudget forever disparaging her answers, her wardrobe, her decorating skills. And that acting talent could be why on “Match Game” they weren’t just panelists but characters. Reilly won a Tony in 1962 for “How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying,” was an acclaimed theater director and had multiple Emmy nominations. #Charles nelson reilly movieSomers acted on Broadway and had a scroll of movie and TV credits. But both were already accomplished veterans of stage and screen. Many viewers were introduced to Somers and Reilly on “Match Game,” as if they’d sprung straight from the Spiegel catalog, the Paris Hiltons of their day, famous for being famous. The repartee was hardly the stuff of Mike Nichols and Elaine May or even Sid Caesar and Imogene Coca they basically tried to match contestants’ answers to questions that called for a lot of toilet and underwear jokes but with Somers and Reilly what mattered more was not what was being said exactly but who was saying it. For nine years Somers and Reilly provided a midafternoon snack of comedic pas de deux that was sometimes bawdy, sometimes puerile but somehow never cheap. Among their usual culprits: television in general and in particular game shows, perhaps the strongest a posteriori evidence that Americans’ brains were getting flabby on cultural junk food.īut if you were one of the millions of housewives or home-sick-from-schoolers or summer vacationers who carved out a portion of the day to spend with these shows, you knew that there could be a form of higher intelligence involved: the campy rejoinders of Paul Lynde (who died in 1982) on “Hollywood Squares” the droll sarcasm of Richard Dawson on “Match Game” (before he became a kissing fool on “Family Feud”) and, on that same show, the daily barb exchange of Brett Somers and Charles Nelson Reilly. If your answer was a) Romantic poets, b) Renaissance painters, c) justices of the Supreme Court or d) anything else highbrow or civic-minded, you’d probably have “matched” any of the anthro-critics who considered American discourse in deep decline. Fill in the blank: In the mid-’70s, most Americans could name more members of the celebrity panels on “Match Game” or “Hollywood Squares” than they could name _. ![]()
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