Up Till Now: The Autobiography

our show, had one hour to prepare five different dishes—which are then judged by four celebrity judges.
    On one show the secret ingredient was crab. We gave the chefs live crabs and they had to create five crab dishes. A young chef made a . . . ready for this? A crab sorbet. Okay, perhaps it doesn’t sound too appetizing but when you actually tasted it, it was worse. It was fishy and crabby. So he was eliminated right away. One of the other contestants made a pasta dish with crab, and was eliminated when a celebrity judge decided, “This spaghetti isn’t like my mother makes. I don’t like it.”
    Wait a minute, I thought, is it fair to judge food that way? As chairman I wasn’t permitted to criticize one of the judges, but I thought, what kind of frame of reference is that? It’s not like my mother makes? Well, of course it isn’t, that’s not your mother. That’s a renowned chef. Maybe you’d prefer a piece of toast with some jam on it? Personally, I’d love that. But would you rather have an egg soufflé with a bit of caviar on top? I wouldn’t, that sounds awful, I want my buttered toast for breakfast.
    That was going through my mind as I was chairing the show. Several weeks later I was reading an article about the great chefs of theworld. One of them has a small restaurant outside Barcelona. At this restaurant he gives his customers what amounts to basically one spoonful of a dish so they can truly understand its taste, and then they go to the next dish. Apparently he bought a carload of tomatoes and an air machine that aerated the tomatoes and allowed him to get to the essence of the taste of a tomato. It was the pure taste of tomato. And as I read that I realized that the young chef had done exactly that, with his sorbet. He had given us the absolute essence of the taste of crab. I understood that this young chef and the master chef in Barcelona were tied together by their desire to bring their artistry to the consumer.
    None of that helped the game show, though. After we’d done two or three episodes the network management changed and we were out of the kitchen.
    Show Me the Money was a much more traditional game show. Contestants got money. Several years ago I appeared at ABC’s Up Fronts, the promotional event held every year to promote the coming television season, representing Boston Legal . In the guise of my suave and sophisticated character, the brilliant litigator Denny Crane, I appeared onstage in a greatcoat, top hat, and cane, accompanied by a line of dancing girls. I proceeded to dance my way into the hearts of those in attendance. But unbeknownst to me, in the audience was the president of Endemol, the company that produces Howie Mandel’s Deal or No Deal, and several other quiz shows. He had a concept for a new big-money quiz show that was quite different from Deal; for example, instead of twenty-five beautiful girls holding briefcases worth a certain amount of money, this show had thirteen gorgeous dancing girls in little cages holding scrolls worth a certain amount of money.
    Basically, it was a game of greed. That’s why it was called Show Me the Money, the classic battle cry from the Tom Cruise movie, Jerry Maguire . As long ago as The $64,000 Question in the 1950s contestants have had to answer the emotional question: take the money and go home or keep playing and risk what you’ve won. That’s the question that gets viewers shouting at the set. Since Monty Hallintroduced the three doors of Let’s Make a Deal —which eliminated the question-and-answer segment of the game and made it purely about greed—that has been the central theme of so many really good game shows. Deal or No Deal is a show about greed, that’s it, how greedy is the contestant going to be and when are they going to stop. That’s the fascination of the show. The contestant comes on the show with nothing and gets a good sum of money and suddenly the greed factor kicks in. You think, is he crazy? They want to buy a farm. They have enough money to buy the farm—and now they want more than the farm. Howie Mandel is a master at milking that greed; somehow he managed to introduce humanity into a show about greed. That’s what I intended to do, explore the humanity of that greed. I really wanted to ask the intriguing question: How much money is enough?
    Admittedly, the rules were a bit confusing. The player picked question A, B, or C and I read the question that was picked but if after hearing it the