Celebrities you will never believe were game show hosts

Maury Povich (Twenty One - 2000)

Here comes another television personality famous for hosting "trashy television" as some might put it. He's best known for saying the phrases "You are the father" and "You are not the father," but at one point, he was part of the million dollar prime time game show boom. He is the one and only Maury Povich.

Back in 1999 when ABC debuted Who Wants To Be A Millionaire?, every other network wanted a piece of the big money action and the race was on to basically copy the Millionaire hype any which way possible. FOX soon debuted Greed with host Chuck Woolery in which contestants could win $2,000,000, Dick Clark hosted a million dollar game for CBS called Winning Lines and NBC brought back a game show with a scandalous past, Twenty One.

In the mid-1950s, the television industry was rocked when it was revealed that a number of the big money quiz shows were being fixed so that likable contestants would keep winning and the viewership would stay intact over the course of many weeks. To do this, these contestants were provided with many of the answers to the questions and were coached on how to act during the game in order to provide dramatic moments and outcomes. This period of television history was notoriously known as the 1950s Game Show Scandal and almost wiped out the game show industry for good. The most famous show that was connected to the scandal was Twenty One, hosted by the future emcee of The Joker's Wild, Jack Barry. It was the biggest game show on at the time and made contestant Charles Van Doren a household name. Unfortunately, America was basically watching a lie unfold on their television sets as Mr. Van Doren, after winning $129,000, confessed that the producers of the show gave him the answers to the questions.

Nearly half a century later, Twenty One returned to television in hopes of re-writing its dark past. Unfortunately, the show only lasted six months. Maury Povich was nothing special of a host. To be fair, the game's format doesn't really provide much room for the host to add a lot of personality, which is probably one of the reason's why the audience lost interest in the show. Maury was, in a way, acting like Jack Berry. He pretty much just went through the motions of the game and was very straightforward with how he presented the show. Sure he showed some excitement when contestants won the game, especially since hundreds of thousands of dollars were on the line with each new match, but besides that, Povich was most likely selected to host the show because of name value and not necessarily game show hosting ability. NBC needed a Regis Philbin-type figure, but picked someone with not even half the charisma as Regis.