Regis Philbin, the boisterous television personality who gained a devoted following on his long-running morning show and helped reinvigorate the prime-time game show genre as host of “Who Wants to be a Millionaire,” died July 24 at 88.
The family confirmed the death in a statement released by a personal representative, Lewis Kay. Further details were not immediately available.
Mr. Philbin’s trademark blend of enthusiasm, quick wit and excitability made him a popular television host for more than six decades.
Initially a page on “The Tonight Show” hosted by Steve Allen, he became one of the most seasoned performers on live television. He was an actor, a singer and nightclub comedian before emerging to greater prominence in the late ’60s as second-banana to entertainer Joey Bishop on an ABC late-night talk show that tried to challenge Johnny Carson’s ratings dominance on NBC.
Mr. Philbin spent many years hosting a morning show in Los Angeles before he returned to his native New York in 1983 to take over a failing morning show on the local ABC-TV outlet in New York. He had two short-lived female co-hosts before teaming with Kathie Lee Gifford in 1985.
Three years later, the program was nationally syndicated as “Live with Regis and Kathie Lee.” Mr. Philbin’s exclamatory, teasing, air-chopping personality played well against Gifford’s much-younger sex appeal and irreverence, and they thrived on small talk about news in the headlines and what Mr. Philbin called “the aggravations, the slights, the family stuff” in their own lives.
They conveyed the chemistry and appeal of a married couple comfortable with each other’s idiosyncrasies.
“I couldn’t decide if he was obnoxiously adorable or adorably obnoxious,” Gifford wrote in her memoir.
For his part, Mr. Philbin told The Washington Post: “She does get on my nerves once in a while, as I do hers. But what I hate is the hosts who are too civil, too nice to one another. I like to keep an edge between us. And if it looks like there’s an antagonistic thing, well, maybe there is.”
Each morning, the show would open with an unscripted “host-chat.” Mr. Philbin refused to talk with his co-host until they were seated in front of the live audience, enabling spontaneous, off-the-cuff conversation.
Part of the appeal was Mr. Philbin’s ability to make fun of his enthusiasms, particularly for his alma mater Notre Dame, and the fact that so much of the daytime competition was reveling in the tasteless and tabloid.
“That was the year of discontent on television,” Mr. Philbin told Entertainment Weekly about the start of his long run with Gifford. “Geraldo [Rivera] was breaking his nose, Phil [Donahue] was walking around in a dress, Sally [Jessy Raphael] was walking around with hookers, Oprah [Winfrey] was losing 65 pounds. And here we were talking about what we did last night! Who cared? But I knew that if they could just watch us two, three times in a row that we could hook our share of the audience. And we did.”
Washington Post television critic Tom Shales wrote in 1992: “Not racy, not freaky, not remotely tawdry, the syndicated daily hour of small talk and tomfoolery has become one of television’s least disheartening hits, and the reason it’s succeeded has everything to do with the wacky cranks at the heart of it.”
Gifford left the show in 2000 to pursue other interests, including a singing career. The show, renamed “Live With Regis,” continued for the first year with guest co-hosts, including Mr. Philbin’s second wife, the former Joy Senese. He teamed with a new partner, former soap opera actress Kelly Ripa, in 2001, and their show “Live! With Regis and Kelly” aired for a decade.
In 1999, Mr. Philbin began hosting the ABC prime-time show “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?,” whose format was borrowed from a game show that had aired successfully in the United Kingdom.
The ABC show was initially given a two-week limited run, and it proved such a ratings winner that the network began broadcasting it three times a week. It was also widely considered instrumental in showing that unscripted programming could attract a broad audience for network TV.
Mr. Philbin had been a game show host earlier in his career and when he heard that “Millionaire” was going to be produced for American television, he enthusiastically lobbied to be its host. He appeared on the “Late Show With David Letterman” and proclaimed that if given the new hosting duties, “I am going to resurrect ABC!”
At the very least, he helped resuscitate the prime-time game show format. Following “Millionaire,” which Mr. Philbin hosted until 2002, the networks aired a slew of game shows including “Twenty-One,” “Weakest Link” and “Deal or No Deal.” Within a few years, the “reality” game show genre, which included popular hits such as “The Amazing Race,” solidified their place on network television.
In the New York Times, journalist Alex Witchel wrote in 1999 that “the X factor of ‘Millionaire’s’ success seems to be — besides the money, of course — that Mr. Philbin genuinely wants the contestants to win.”
Mr. Philbin’s experience was suited to carry the show in front of a live studio audience. His much-imitated catchphrase, “Is that your final answer?,” kept the show suspenseful and intriguing.
“I got lucky with this show,” he told the Times in 1999. “I thought I had climbed my mountain with the morning show. Big hit locally and nationally. And all of a sudden this ‘Millionaire’ show comes along and I’m pushed to another mountain peak. I really don’t dare ask anything more. This is it. What else can I want?”
Saturday, July 25, 2020
Saturday, July 04, 2020
acts of kindness
Acts of kindness may not be that random after all. Science says being kind pays off.
Research shows that acts of kindness make us feel better and healthier. Kindness is also key to how we evolved and survived as a species, scientists say. We are hard-wired to be kind.
Kindness “is as bred in our bones as our anger or our lust or our grief or as our desire for revenge,” said University of California San Diego psychologist Michael McCullough, author of the forthcoming book “Kindness of Strangers.” It’s also, he said, “the main feature we take for granted.”
Scientific research is booming into human kindness and what scientists have found so far speaks well of us.
“Kindness is much older than religion. It does seem to be universal,” said University of Oxford anthropologist Oliver Curry, research director at Kindlab. “The basic reason why people are kind is that we are social animals.”
We prize kindness over any other value. When psychologists lumped values into ten categories and asked people what was more important, benevolence or kindness, comes out on top, beating hedonism, having an exciting life, creativity, ambition, tradition, security, obedience, seeking social justice and seeking power, said University of London psychologist Anat Bardi, who studies value systems.
“We’re kind because under the right circumstances we all benefit from kindness,” Oxford’s Curry said.
When it comes to a species’ survival “kindness pays, friendliness pays,” said Duke University evolutionary anthropologist Brian Hare, author of the new book “Survival of the Friendliest.”
Kindness and cooperation work for many species, whether it’s bacteria, flowers or our fellow primate bonobos. The more friends you have, the more individuals you help, the more successful you are, Hare said.
For example, Hare, who studies bonobos and other primates, compares aggressive chimpanzees, which attack outsiders, to bonobos where the animals don’t kill but help out strangers. Male bonobos are far more successful at mating than their male chimp counterparts, Hare said.
McCullough sees bonobos as more the exceptions. Most animals aren’t kind or helpful to strangers, just close relatives so in that way it is one of the traits that separate us from other species, he said. And that, he said, is because of the human ability to reason.
Humans realize that there’s not much difference between our close relatives and strangers and that someday strangers can help us if we are kind to them, McCullough said.
Reasoning “is the secret ingredient, which is why we donate blood when there are disasters” and why most industrialized nations spend at least 20% of their money on social programs, such as housing and education, McCullough said.
Duke’s Hare also points to mama bears to understand the evolution and biology of kindness and its aggressive nasty flip side. He said studies point to certain areas of the brain, the medial prefrontal cortex, temporal parietal junction and other spots as either activated or dampened by emotional activity. The same places give us the ability to nurture and love, but also dehumanize and exclude, he said.
When mother bears are feeding and nurturing their cubs, these areas in the brain are activated and it allows them to be generous and loving, Hare said. But if someone comes near the mother bear at that time, it sets of the brain’s threat mechanisms in the same places. The same bear becomes its most aggressive and dangerous.
Hare said he sees this in humans. Some of the same people who are generous to family and close friends, when they feel threatened by outsiders become angrier. He points to the current polarization of the world.
“More isolated groups are more likely to be feel threatened by others and they are more likely to morally exclude, dehumanize,” Hare said. “And that opens the door to cruelty.”
But overall our bodies aren’t just programmed to be nice, they reward us for being kind, scientists said.
“Doing kindness makes you happier and being happier makes you do kind acts,” said labor economist Richard Layard, who studies happiness at the London School of Economics and wrote the new book “Can We Be Happier?”
University of California Riverside psychology professor Sonja Lyubomirsky has put that concept to the test in numerous experiments over 20 years and repeatedly found that people feel better when they are kind to others, even more than when they are kind to themselves.
“Acts of kindness are very powerful,” Lyubomirsky said.
In one experiment, she asked subjects to do an extra three acts of kindness for other people a week and asked a different group to do three acts of self-kindness. They could be small, like opening a door for someone, or big. But the people who were kind to others became happier and felt more connected to the world.
The same occurred with money, using it to help others versus helping yourself. Lyubomirsky said she thinks it is because people spend too much time thinking and worrying about themselves and when they think of others while doing acts of kindness, it redirects them away from their own problems.
Oxford’s Curry analyzed peer-reviewed research like Lyubomirsky’s and found at least 27 studies showing the same thing: Being kind makes people feel better emotionally.
But it’s not just emotional. It’s physical.
Lyubomirsky said a study of people with multiple sclerosis and found they felt better physically when helping others. She also found that in people doing more acts of kindness that the genes that trigger inflammation were turned down more than in people who don’t.
And she said in upcoming studies, she’s found more antiviral genes in people who performed acts of kindness.
Follow Seth Borenstein on Twitter at @borenbears
Research shows that acts of kindness make us feel better and healthier. Kindness is also key to how we evolved and survived as a species, scientists say. We are hard-wired to be kind.
Kindness “is as bred in our bones as our anger or our lust or our grief or as our desire for revenge,” said University of California San Diego psychologist Michael McCullough, author of the forthcoming book “Kindness of Strangers.” It’s also, he said, “the main feature we take for granted.”
Scientific research is booming into human kindness and what scientists have found so far speaks well of us.
“Kindness is much older than religion. It does seem to be universal,” said University of Oxford anthropologist Oliver Curry, research director at Kindlab. “The basic reason why people are kind is that we are social animals.”
We prize kindness over any other value. When psychologists lumped values into ten categories and asked people what was more important, benevolence or kindness, comes out on top, beating hedonism, having an exciting life, creativity, ambition, tradition, security, obedience, seeking social justice and seeking power, said University of London psychologist Anat Bardi, who studies value systems.
“We’re kind because under the right circumstances we all benefit from kindness,” Oxford’s Curry said.
When it comes to a species’ survival “kindness pays, friendliness pays,” said Duke University evolutionary anthropologist Brian Hare, author of the new book “Survival of the Friendliest.”
Kindness and cooperation work for many species, whether it’s bacteria, flowers or our fellow primate bonobos. The more friends you have, the more individuals you help, the more successful you are, Hare said.
For example, Hare, who studies bonobos and other primates, compares aggressive chimpanzees, which attack outsiders, to bonobos where the animals don’t kill but help out strangers. Male bonobos are far more successful at mating than their male chimp counterparts, Hare said.
McCullough sees bonobos as more the exceptions. Most animals aren’t kind or helpful to strangers, just close relatives so in that way it is one of the traits that separate us from other species, he said. And that, he said, is because of the human ability to reason.
Humans realize that there’s not much difference between our close relatives and strangers and that someday strangers can help us if we are kind to them, McCullough said.
Reasoning “is the secret ingredient, which is why we donate blood when there are disasters” and why most industrialized nations spend at least 20% of their money on social programs, such as housing and education, McCullough said.
Duke’s Hare also points to mama bears to understand the evolution and biology of kindness and its aggressive nasty flip side. He said studies point to certain areas of the brain, the medial prefrontal cortex, temporal parietal junction and other spots as either activated or dampened by emotional activity. The same places give us the ability to nurture and love, but also dehumanize and exclude, he said.
When mother bears are feeding and nurturing their cubs, these areas in the brain are activated and it allows them to be generous and loving, Hare said. But if someone comes near the mother bear at that time, it sets of the brain’s threat mechanisms in the same places. The same bear becomes its most aggressive and dangerous.
Hare said he sees this in humans. Some of the same people who are generous to family and close friends, when they feel threatened by outsiders become angrier. He points to the current polarization of the world.
“More isolated groups are more likely to be feel threatened by others and they are more likely to morally exclude, dehumanize,” Hare said. “And that opens the door to cruelty.”
But overall our bodies aren’t just programmed to be nice, they reward us for being kind, scientists said.
“Doing kindness makes you happier and being happier makes you do kind acts,” said labor economist Richard Layard, who studies happiness at the London School of Economics and wrote the new book “Can We Be Happier?”
University of California Riverside psychology professor Sonja Lyubomirsky has put that concept to the test in numerous experiments over 20 years and repeatedly found that people feel better when they are kind to others, even more than when they are kind to themselves.
“Acts of kindness are very powerful,” Lyubomirsky said.
In one experiment, she asked subjects to do an extra three acts of kindness for other people a week and asked a different group to do three acts of self-kindness. They could be small, like opening a door for someone, or big. But the people who were kind to others became happier and felt more connected to the world.
The same occurred with money, using it to help others versus helping yourself. Lyubomirsky said she thinks it is because people spend too much time thinking and worrying about themselves and when they think of others while doing acts of kindness, it redirects them away from their own problems.
Oxford’s Curry analyzed peer-reviewed research like Lyubomirsky’s and found at least 27 studies showing the same thing: Being kind makes people feel better emotionally.
But it’s not just emotional. It’s physical.
Lyubomirsky said a study of people with multiple sclerosis and found they felt better physically when helping others. She also found that in people doing more acts of kindness that the genes that trigger inflammation were turned down more than in people who don’t.
And she said in upcoming studies, she’s found more antiviral genes in people who performed acts of kindness.
Follow Seth Borenstein on Twitter at @borenbears
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