The story
Jack Barry and Dan Enright first met at radio station WOR in New York, where Barry was a staff announcer. Their first collaborations were Juvenile Jury, a show which featured a panel of children, who came up with their takes on everyday problems and situations, which were submitted by listeners. This would be followed with Life Begins at Eighty, which was essentially a geriatric version of the former. Both shows made their way to television in 1950.
Another children's show from Barry & Enright was Winky Dink and You, which engaged the young viewers to use their imaginations, as well as a special "magic slate"—a sheet of durable plastic that stuck to the TV screen via static electricity, which enabled the viewer to use crayons to "draw along" with Mr. Barry, as he told stories to the children. A kinescope of this series is available on the tape-trading circuit.
In 1953, Barry & Enright created their first game show, Back That Fact, hosted by Borscht Belt comedian and syndicated columnist Joey Adams. Also that year, the company teamed up with Ed Friendly, a former ABC executive, so the company was renamed to Barry, Enright & Friendly Productions, only to sell back its stock in 1955, back to the old Barry & Enright Productions name.
In 1956 Barry & Enright created the game shows Twenty-One, which was created in response to the highly successful The $64,000 Question, and Tic-Tac-Dough. The company, along with Robert Noah, also created and produced the original version of Concentration. Two years later Twenty-One was cancelled as part of the quiz show scandals, when it was revealed that the producers pre-arranged outcomes. The scandal led to federal legislation against the rigging of game shows and every form of competition show. In 1959 Tic-Tac-Dough was also canceled. Barry & Enright were forced to sell their game shows to NBC, including Concentration, Twenty-One, Dough Re Mi and Tic-Tac-Dough. The company later ceased to exist. Enright formed Aladan Productions, while Barry continued, forming Jack Barry Productions.
Comeback to television
The pair, blacklisted in the United States, developed several game shows in Canada in the 1960s.
In 1963, Jack Barry Productions worked for Paramount Television Productions to develop game show pilots, mainly for KTLA-TV. He produced pilots, and almost sold its pitch Where Are You From? to CBS, but it was dropped out due to the failure of ABC's 100 Grand.
In 1967, Barry created a daytime game show Everybody's Talking which ran for 26 weeks on ABC. But because of his reputation, he received no public credit; it would be revived in 1973, with a slightly altered format, and re-titled Hollywood's Talking. It ran for 13 weeks on CBS. In 1971, Dan Enright came back to television as executive producer for All About Faces.
After an unsuccessful stint working with former rivals Mark Goodson and Bill Todman, Jack Barry first staged a comeback as an emcee, replacing Dennis Wholey on the short-lived game show The Generation Gap in 1969. Barry then formed his own production company, which he named Jack Barry Productions, partnering with Four Star International until divorced in early 1972, and first made a revival of the earlier game show Juvenile Jury, and in 1971 he sold The Reel Game, which he also hosted, to ABC.
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Then in 1972, Barry resurrected his career by selling The Joker's Wild to CBS; the Barry-hosted series became a hit and lasted for three seasons on the network's daytime schedule before its 1975 cancellation. The series had been developed while Barry was still working for Goodson-Todman Productions and two pilots had been shot with Allen Ludden as host, but the series did not sell until Barry gained the rights to the series and took over as host. Barry's production company, however, did not put out any other hit series during this time, as evidenced by the short-lived Hollywood's Talking and Blank Check.
In 1974, Dan Enright came back to the company after nearly a decade of working at Screen Gems, who worked on Canadian projects, worked as a staff executive. In 1975, the company, under Enright's supervision, pitched two pilots to CBS and ABC, but neither sold to series.
Barry & Enright Productions reformed
In 1975, Barry hired Enright as a producer for The Joker's Wild, who was just employed after working for nearly a decade at Screen Gems. After the series' cancellation the partnership was renewed and Barry & Enright Productions was reformed using the team of the old Jack Barry Productions company, although the name Jack Barry Productions existed as in-name-only.
The first series produced by the revived production company was Break the Bank, a celebrity game show that originally aired on ABC in the spring of 1976 and later that year in syndication with Tom Kennedy (ABC) and Barry hosting. The company formed a partnership with Colbert Television Sales to syndicate most of the series output, started a long-running partnership that lasted nearly a decade.
Barry and Enright then relaunched The Joker's Wild for first-run syndication in 1977, and the following year they licensed the rights to their old 1950s series Tic Tac Dough from NBC, who owns the trademark, for CBS and syndication. Although TTD was cancelled by CBS, the syndicated version became a hit and ran until 1986. Barry & Enright also produced Bullseye and Play the Percentages for syndication in 1980 and Hot Potato for NBC in 1984, which was their last series for a network.
Although the production company was primarily known for game shows, it also worked on other projects such as the comedy films, Private Lessons (1981) and Making Mr. Right (1987) as well as CBS's Jake's Way, a 1980 unsold Western drama series pilot starring Robert Fuller as Fox County Sheriff Jake Rudd, and the short-lived 1982–1983 syndicated investigative newsmagazine Jack Anderson Confidential.
In 1984, the company stepped up their own motion picture activity in order to launch and develop various several projects, and had option rights for two novels in order to adapt to screen.
Aftermath
In early 1984, Barry was preparing to retire from The Joker's Wild and hand the show over to Jim Peck, his substitute host, as well as take a less active role in the production company (as he was 65 when the year began). However, on May 2, 1984, he suffered a massive heart attack while jogging in New York's Central Park and died. With control of the company now solely in his hands, Enright decided to make several changes to Barry's policies and practices that he and several other staffers did not agree with. One of the bigger changes was to hire Bill Cullen, who had just finished hosting Hot Potato, in place of Peck to host The Joker's Wild.
Enright's changes dissatisfied several longtime employees, including producer Richard S. Kline and Barry's sons, Jon and Douglas. Kline left to form his own production company, Kline and Friends, and took Barry's sons and several other staffers with him including set designer John C. Mula and music composer Hal Hidey. Enright continued to run the company for several years after Barry's death and Kline's departure.
But after both Joker and Tic Tac Dough went off the air in 1986, Barry & Enright Productions failed to produce another hit series in America (although Enright and Wink Martindale co-produced a Canadian-based hit in Bumper Stumpers for the Global Television Network, which also aired in America on USA Network and in the UK, a series called Chain Letters co-produced by Action Time and Tyne Tees Television the same year for ITV).
On July 23, 1986, the company teamed up with television movie producer and book packager Les Alexander to start Barry & Enright & Alexander Productions to produce made-for-television movies and two-hour miniseries, and Les Alexander took a number of projects with them. On July 30, 1986, the company had bought out First Media, which was a distributor-publisher of electronic press kits, and producer-coordinator of press conferences that are conducted via satellite hookups, and the company would be folded into Barry & Enright Productions in order to serve as a division of the studio.
The last program under the Barry & Enright name was a short-lived revival of Tic Tac Dough hosted by Patrick Wayne in 1990. In 1991, the company was renamed Stafford-Enright Productions. Dan Enright died on May 22, 1992. Under the name Stafford-Enright, Susan Stafford executive produced a PBS documentary special The Natural Solutions: Freedom of Choice and the FDA in 1993.
Common practices
Barry & Enright game shows were known for certain practices that typically were the same across all shows produced by the company regardless of format. For instance, on The Joker's Wild, Tic-Tac-Dough, and Bullseye, all contestants played until they were defeated (although in The Joker's Wild's case, when it aired on CBS, the network had imposed a $25,000 limit on winnings—this ruling was inclusive to all other game shows airing on CBS at the time) as well as for a brief period in the 1980s, where a winnings limit was in place where a contestant could be retired if they reached it. Five consecutive match wins meant the contestant would win a new car, and since contestants could continue until losing it was possible to win multiple cars (an example being Thom McKee, Tic-Tac-Dough's all-time winningest contestant, who won eight cars during his 43-match winning streak). Successor company Sony Pictures Television later used both practices on their Jeopardy! game show; from 1997 to 2003, contestants who retired after winning five consecutive matches won a car; that was abandoned in 2003 when the show adopted the rule allowing winning contestants to continue until losing, leading to 74, 32, and 20 game winners in the 16 years of that format. In 2009 Family Feud adopted the same format, families who win 5 consecutive shows in a row would receive a new car, regardless if they won every Fast Money round in their games or not. In addition, all combined winnings were in increments of $50 (with the exception of The Joker's Wild, whose bonus game featured cash amounts beginning at $25).
Most of the Barry & Enright series featured bonus games that were games of chance. Although the objective was different on each show that employed one of these chance games a similarity existed, where a contestant would have to avoid a hazard element that would cause the contestant to lose the round and all bonus winnings. If the contestant was able to complete the objective they would be rewarded with whatever cash they earned and a package of prizes that typically was worth at least double the cash amount they would win in the round.
Examples of these objectives:
The Joker's Wild: Avoid "The Devil". To win the player had to accumulate $1,000 or more or spin three of the same dollar amounts in one turn (referred to as a "natural triple"). The "Avoid the Devil" format was abandoned by Barry's children, who produced the 1990 version.
Tic-Tac-Dough: Avoid a dragon. Depending on the series, a round could be won by either completing a tic-tac-toe line, accumulating over $1,000 or finding the words TIC and TAC, or by finding a dragon slayer.
Bullseye: Avoid a bolt of lightning. A win could be accomplished in two ways: either by collecting three bullseyes in one spin or a combination of multiple spins, or by surviving a set number of spins without uncovering the lightning; the amount of cash a contestant won would vary from round to round, with a maximum payoff of $10,000 in cash by spinning three bullseyes on one spin.
21 (1982 unaired pilot): Accumulate a higher score than the "computer" in a game of computerized blackjack without busting or the computer hitting 17 or above (according to Las Vegas blackjack rules) to win $2,000 and a prize package.
Break the Bank (1976 syndicated series): Accumulate $2,000 or more from cards held by nine celebrities without finding the card that reads "BUST"; doing so augments cash total to $5,000.
Bumper Stumpers: (1987–1988) Accumulate $1,000 or more without finding a Stop sign.
Note that Play the Percentages (avoid the answer that was not in the top five answers), the 1990 The Joker's Wild (60-second round, and players spun to match windows based on how many spins were won in the first half), and later years of Bumper Stumpers (solve multiple plates) did not use the practice.
From Wikipedia’s article on Barry & Enright Productions, shared under CC BY-SA 4.0.3