The Price Is Right for Primetime

For the first time in a little over 20 years, CBS is putting it's most successful daytime game show in a regular prime-time slot.

Long-time staple The Price Is Right will take up residence on CBS' Friday night schedule for six non-consecutive weeks beginning Feb. 22. The move is a bid (without going over) to cut down on repeats caused by the ongoing writer's strike.

CBS has run Price specials in prime-time before, but this is the first time the game show will be shown since Drew Carey took over as host of the show from Bob Barker, who retired last June.

Meanwhile, Carey's other show - Power of 10, is being yanked off the prime-time schedule, for now, but will return in the summer.

Though successful in daytime, Price has often stumbled outside of the daypart, with two recent syndicated nighttime versions - a 1985-86 version hosted by Tom Kennedy (which did not air in Chicago because of WBBM-TV slotting the network show at 4 p.m. at the time) - and a 1994 version hosted by Doug Davidson -failing big time. Price did have modest success as a weekly syndicated prime-access series airing from 1972 to 1980, with Dennis James as the host for the first four seasons, with Barker taking over from the fifth season onward.

The last time CBS regularly scheduled The Price Is Right in prime-time was in the summer of 1986 on Thursday nights, where the program aired opposite The Cosby Show and Family Ties.