Who Wants to Be a Millionaire
"Is that your final answer?" For a couple of years around the millennium, Regis Philbin, a tiered ladder to a million dollars, three lifelines, and a set that dimmed to a heartbeat pulse made this the biggest show on television — running multiple nights a week and minting the country's first game-show millionaires.
The American Who Wants to Be a Millionaire premiered on ABC on August 16, 1999, hosted by Regis Philbin and adapted from a hit British format. The formula was simple and gripping: a contestant climbed a ladder of increasingly hard multiple-choice questions toward a $1,000,000 top prize, with three lifelines — 50:50, Phone a Friend, and Ask the Audience — to lean on. Philbin's grave "Is that your final answer?" and the theatrical dimming lights and pulsing music turned trivia into suspense.
It became a genuine phenomenon. ABC aired it several nights a week and it drew as many as 30 million viewers a night, finishing the 1999–2000 season as the number-one show on television with an average around 28.8 million viewers. On November 19, 1999, John Carpenter became the first contestant to win the top prize — famously using his Phone a Friend lifeline on the final question not for help, but to call his dad and tell him he was about to win a million dollars.
The blaze burned out almost as fast as it started; overexposed, the primetime version fell out of the top 20 by the end of the 2001–02 season. The franchise carried on in daytime syndication from 2002 with Meredith Vieira, and later hosts, running until 2019 — but the Regis-era, appointment-TV Millionaire is the one seared into memory.
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