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Even with the added variety, six pricing games uninterrupted could be a lot to take. A new qualifying round for the showcase would be needed, both to break the pace of the show up and to avoid always sending the “top two winners” to the final round, since it was hardly fair to the four contestants who wouldn’t play for cars.

What’s more, NBC’s new show Wheel of Fortune was not only succeeding, it was now directly facing off against Price’s timeslot. How could a show like Price compete against the spectacle of an enormous 2000lb spinning wheel?

For the next seven weeks, TPIR returned to its traditional half-hour format while CBS evaluated the results. The experiment was deemed a success, CBS greenlit the expansion, and on November 3, 1975, the hourlong expansion became permanent.

A third permanent model, Dian Parkinson, was also hired to assist Janice and Anitra with modeling duties.

With the expansion, a wide variety of pricing games were introduced. This wave included some of the show’s most iconic games like Cliff Hangers, Dice Game, and Three Strikes. A whopping nine pricing games were introduced, more by far than in any other season save the debut!

Taping 60 minute shows was not as easy as taping 30 minute shows. With half-hour episodes, the crew could shoot four in a single tape day; after the expansion, only two hourlong episodes could typically be taped per day.

Since studio availability (and crew exhaustion) prevented doubling the number of tape dates, TPIR became one of the first game shows to purposefully schedule reruns. Each season would stop airing new episodes in the summer and switch to reruns for July and August, with new episodes resuming when the new season hit the airwaves in the fall.

The hourlong TPIR faced off at 10:00 AM EST against local programming on ABC, and Celebrity Sweepstakes at 10:00 and the new hit Wheel of Fortune at 10:30 on NBC.

In mid-January, Wheel of Fortune was bumped back to 11:00 to avoid direct conflict with TPIR. In its place, NBC put High Rollers; by summer, TPIR had driven High Rollers off the air.

(Thanks to the Daytime TV Archive for the great work!)

Producer Jay Wolpert had been involved with running the day-to-day of the CBS version while EP Frank Wayne focused on the nighttime version. But Wolpert had ambitions of his own. Before landing at Goodson-Todman, he had previously created a quiz show that had been pitched to CBS, and CBS had become interested in picking up Wolpert’s quiz to pair with TPIR in their daytime block.

Wolpert would split his time between his new quiz show Double Dare (unrelated to the future Nickelodeon show of the same name) and his duties on TPIR.

In December, CBS replaced Gambit with Double Dare, a quiz show created by head TPIR producer Jay Wolpert. Like Gambit, Double Dare also struggled to find an audience against Wheel.

By March, Double Dare was moved to the weaker 10AM slot. The stronger TPIR moved a half hour later where it would directly face off again against both NBC game shows.

At 10:30, TPIR proved capable of holding its own against NBC’s game shows. Its lead in was not so lucky. Even with weak competition Double Dare struggled to improve its ratings, and was replaced with reruns.

In November, TPIR moved back to 10:00, leading into Match Game at 11:00. This move proved disastrous for Match Game; it alienated fans who were used to tuning in after school, and who could not watch in the mornings. Ratings for Match Game nosedived, and the decision was reversed after just six weeks.

In December, TPIR returned to 10:30, and Match Game returned to afternoons. Tattletales moved from the afternoon to 10:00 as TPIR’s lead-in, but also failed to find an audience in mornings and was canceled by April.

A new game show, Pass the Buck, took its timeslot; by June, it too, was also swiftly canceled. Though TPIR itself was proving to be a stable morning show, it was having serious trouble finding a lead-in.

This may have been a creative overreach. Telephone Game and Shower Game were quickly pulled, and Punch a Bunch and Penny Ante had to be simplified after a few playings. The idea of playing pricing games for cash, however, proved to be an enduring one.

Wheel of Fortune had moved to avoid TPIR’s footprint, and NBC had slotted in a revival of High Rollers. TPIR held its edge over both NBC games. But CBS had given up trying to fill the 10AM slot, opting to lead into TPIR with reruns.

NBC finally pulled Hollywood Squares from mornings (where it had spent the vast majority of its 12-year run) in an attempt to slot in Jeopardy!, which proved unsuccessful and quickly replaced by All-Star Secrets. TPIR proved capable of holding off both.

TPIR was faced with its most daunting task: to chip away audience from ABC’s Family Feud. At 11:30, Feud was the highest-rated daytime game show, which TPIR was now facing in direct competition.

After leaving Match Game, Feud host Richard Dawson had spent the past few years melding his personality with the game’s format (to the chagrin of Goodson-Todman staff). Dawson occasionally began each Feud episode with a monologue, and had parried his fame into a position filling in for Johnny Carson on The Tonight Show.

Dawson had made Feud the #1 daytime game show and successfully spun off a hit syndicated nighttime version, so clearly he was doing something right.

TPIR may have aimed to compete with Dawson by putting Bob’s personality even more front and center. Bob certainly had no trouble establishing himself on-camera, and, similar to Dawson, had no shortage of female contestants willing to greet the host with a kiss on the air. Two new games bearing Bob’s name entered the game rotation helping establish TPIR as “Bob’s show”.

Goodson-Todman shopped the nighttime TPIR around to CBS stations, who agreed to pick it up on the condition that Bob Barker step in as host to keep as much parity with the daytime version as possible.

Truth or Consequences had paused production in 1975, so Bob was now available to work in nighttime syndication. After 19 years on Truth, Bob Barker chose to permanently leave his old show that had made him famous and replace Dennis James on the nighttime version of TPIR.

The nighttime TPIR ran an additional three seasons with Bob at the helm. Very few episodes of this era circulate among collectors, as it has never been rerun and home VCRs were rare…. but the few available episodes help paint a snapshot.

This ratings upswing didn’t last long. The syndicated landscape was changing dramatically. By November 1979, TPIR had fallen out of the top 15 syndicated shows.

Once-a-week syndicated nighttime shows were rapidly falling out of favor, and five-day-a-week “strip” syndicated shows were taking their place. With fewer timeslots in prime access available, it was much harder for a once-a-week TPIR to hold on to its niche.

By 1980, Goodson-Todman’s weekly syndicated game shows, including the nighttime Feud, were preparing to expand to five days a week. The nighttime TPIR was not equipped to make this leap.

With nighttime TPIR viewership once again on the downswing, and TPIR’s production crew and host already taxed to their limits meeting the demands of one daily version, Goodson-Todman chose not to move forward with further seasons of nighttime TPIR. In its place, they elected to revive To Tell The Truth as a daily syndicated show.