Pass The Buck
First episode: April 3, 1978
Last episode: June 30, 1978
Seen weekday mornings 10:00-10:30 on CBS
The Show:
"Ladies and gentlemen, these four players are about to make instant decisions under pressure. Only the last survivor will win the game and all the money on Pass the Buck!"
Four contestants, one a returning champion, compete to win a bank of money. Bill announces a category, which might be based in fact ("Games played with a ball") or dependent on the offstage judge's opinion ("What you do when you're sick"). The bank starts at $100, and the contestants, one at a time, give answers. Every acceptable answer adds $25 to the bank. Play continues until one contestant gives an unacceptable answer or repeats an answer. The next player in line can "knock out" that player by giving an acceptable answer. If that contestant gives a wrong answer, the next contestant can knock out both players with an acceptable answer. If that contestant gives an unacceptable answer, the last remaining contestant can knock out all three opponents with a right answer. If all four contestants give consecutive wrong answers, the question is thrown out.
The eliminated contestant(s) move to the "bullpen" next to Bill's podium for the remainder of the game. The remaining contestants continue playing the game with a new category. The last contestant standing wins all the money in the bank and plays Fast Bucks for $5,000.
Fast Bucks is played with four levels. The first level hides four answers. Bill reads a subject, and the contestant has 15 seconds to give as many items as possible that fit the subject. If s/he guesses any of the four hidden answers on the board, it pays $100 per answer; revealing all four pays $5,000. If the contestant fails to reveal all four answers, s/he moves to the second level, with a new category and only three items hidden. If the contestant can't reveal all three answers, there is a third level with two hidden answers and a fourth with one hidden answer. If the contestant fails to reveal any answers on a level the game stops immediately.
If Fast Bucks is won, the contestant faces three new challengers. If not, the three losing contestants come back for the next game; the same four contestants will continue competing against each other until one of them wins Fast Bucks (so theoretically, a player could amass a small fortune without ever winning the bonus).
Notes:
Another late-70s Bob Stewart effort that ran its minimum thirteen weeks before vanishing. This one perhaps a little more ill-conceived than most, relying as it did so often on awkward judgement calls and arbitrary "right" answers.
After over 30 years in the city, Bill left New York after the cancellation of Pass the Buck and relocated to Los Angeles. Some period newspaper articles seem to imply that Bill had already started taping his next series, The Love Experts, when Pass the Buck premiered, which would indicate that Bill was doing a cross-country commute to do one show or the other.
A pilot for the series was shot on May 7, 1977, at the CBS Broadcast Center in New York. Another pilot was shot ten months later, on March 20, 1978. The show's premiere date had already been publicly announced by that point; the earliest mention of the show in the press was March 2. This means that the March 20, 1978 was closer to a "shakedown show," a not-for-broadcast pilot designed to get everyone into the groove of doing the show and iron out any last-minute kinks.
Nearly all of the publicity stills for Pass the Buck, including the one on this page, were shot during the March 1978 pilot. Possibly the most interesting thing about the publicity stills is that nearly all of them display a remnant from a format change. In the pilots, the Fast Bucks round was called the Cash Box, and the squares on the game board concealing the winning answers were designed to resemble treasure chests. Hence the prominent keyhole in the logo, which was never actually used on the series. The logo on Bill's lectern was hastily painted over before tapings on the series began, and we've been told a tale that as taping started for episode #1, a stagehand hurried onstage to warn Bill not to touch the front of the lectern during the show, because the paint was still wet.
The show floundered in the ratings for 13 weeks. An attempt to spruce up the game was tried a few times in the ninth week. One question per episode was called a "Bonus Question" by Bill. A standard question would be asked in the main game ("Name something that you crack," for example) and the game would play as usual, but a vacation was awarded if one of the contestants gave a somewhat unlikely pre-selected answer ("A joke.")
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A visitor on our Facebook page described another attempt to breathe life into things. He attended a taping about halfway through the run and was surprised to find that, in addition to taping episodes of the show that day, they taped some not-for-broadcast trial runs of a new format for the Fast Bucks round. Our visitor's account was that in the revised version, the contestant was trying to match answers given by celebrity guest Adrienne Barbeau in a pre-recorded interview. We trust our Facebook visitor, but we're also inclined to believe this because Bob Stewart Productions was famous for hanging onto old ideas and repurposing them for future formats. The revised bonus round described here bears a striking resemblance to a prior Bob Stewart series, Personality, and the idea was tried again in the 1980s for an unsold pilot called Famous Last Words.
That spiffy photo of the Ed Sullivan Theater marquee was snapped by Bill's wife Ann. The theater had previously been home to To Tell the Truth during Bill's first two seasons as a regular panelist, as well as the summer run of I've Got a Secret in 1976. The theater fell into disrepair during the next 15 years until it was renovated in preparation for David Letterman's jump from NBC to CBS in 1993. It's currently the home of The Late Show with Stephen Colbert.
Clipping:
Click the thumbnail to read Variety's review of Pass the Buck.
Video:
It appears the entire series (62 episodes) exists, and episodes have aired on Game Show Network and GameTV.