Be sure to watch today's (Monday 10/24) edition of The Insider for news about Holly Hallstrom and her legal action involving The Price Is Right.

The Insider is hosted by Pat O'Brien.

Or as his peeps call him, the Notorious P.O.B., HOLLA!

Holly appeared on the Today Show this morning as well. The segment can be found on today.msnbc.com (#4 on Monday's video list - click the right arrow three times and you should see a familiar face).

By the way, she is a tad chunkier than she once was, but to me she still looks like a million bucks.

I am totally rooting for Holly. For Barker to sue her after dumping her from the show tells you what kind of guy Bob Barker is.

Where did NBC get the footage from? I guess I'm not sure why Freemantle Media would provide them with footage for a negative segment on a competitor's network.

Nothin' to root for, she says in the piece that the settlement check (whose value she would not divulge, save to confirm that it was in "millions") cleared last week. She's already a winner. :)

I'm sure all of that came from file footage. Once you have footage, you have footage, it's not like you have to pay for it to use it again. I'm sure they got that file way back for some kind of story (or it just came down as file, for any number of reasons), at the time Fremantle gave it up willingly, and now they're getting it on the back end. Betcha any money it was fed when Barker got his Walk Of Fame star, or when they were hyping his birthday, or the renaming of 33.

This is a really stupid question, but what was the suit about?

Only a little stupid in that all would have been told if you went to the link and watched the piece, but I could see where for any number of reasons you might not be able to, so: During the whole Dian Parkinson fiasco, Holly claims that Barker asked her to do interviews and such saying what a swell guy he was and that he would never do anything like that and Dian was a liar, and Holly refused. Barker then fired her, citing weight-gain issues from a medication she was taking at the time. She sued for wrongful termination, he counteresued for slander and defamation of character.

Good for her!

Now here's hoping we can move on and enjoy the show.

And he's wonderful in it....especially if one is watching while taking a bubble bath.

The mental images....they hurt....my head...

Visions of Jimmy Joe Jeeter.

It's acutally the other way around. Barker brought the slander suit first and she countersued for wrongful termination.

In my opinion, Holly going around saying she was fired for being overweight is not sufficiently damaging to Barker's reputation to merit a judgement for defamation. It may put a chink in Barker's gargantuan ego but it is not the stuff of defamation awards. If Barker had swallowed and not brought his suit, maybe Holly wouldn't have brought the countersuit in which she prevailed. My opinion: Barker's ego has cost the defendants an amount in the upper seven figures.

Okay. That was how she couched it in the Today interview, that she sued and he countersued. I sit corrected.
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I don't understand how Goodson cancelled Feud and threw Dawson in the trash after just 9 years, yet he had someone like Barker working for him for the last 20 freaking years of his life.

My guess would be that Barker wasn't an asshat for most of that. The vibe I get is that the extreme egoism didn't really start kicking in until the early- to mid-90's or so, and by the time it did, Goodson/Fremantle/Whoever couldn't afford to be rid of him, so they just deal with it.

Why would a packager cancel his own show?

I have the feeling that the ego was always there, considering that I had heard that he politicked (with Barbara Hunter of CBS in his corner) to get the EP title after Frank Wayne's death. It's just become more pronounced over time, especially as the show became his own private duchy. It's hard to be a real asshat when Goodson's still in charge, Frank Wayne's your immediate boss and your show is just one of many others under the same roof at 6430 Sunset (and not even the top performer amongst them). But when the shows drop off one-by-one, Goodson dies and the folks at the network and parent company become more solicitious...

To let a newer, better show replace it.

*boggle*

And in 1985, that show was? Rhetorical, Zach, sit down.

And no, it wasn't Boggle. ;-)

The Interactive Game!

For the record, Goodson did not axe Feud... low ratings did. A certain show with a spinning wheel hosted by a former weatherman knocked Feud out of the number 1 slot.

According to E! THS, Goodson did consider replacing Richard after the 1980 season. Richard was vacationing in Hawaii, and he threatened to stay in Hawaii unless he got a major raise, and control over whether to bring back families that lost unfairly. ABC, however, granted Richard what he wanted.

As for Holly and Bob, I wonder, if they find that Holly is telling the truth, and that perhaps Bob did sexually harass Dian, could that mean that Dian could sue Bob again?

I don't think so. That would be double jeopardy.

Lordy sakes alive! What planet do you guys come from?

Merv Griffin...Jeopardy-->Wheel of Fortune

I have written here that Barker used to be so uninvolved with the show that he didn't even attend game development meetings (I don't know if he was even invited). I find great irony in the fact that the producers of Match Game and others in the company who had nothing whatsoever to do with TPIR would attend and present games and Barker was nowhere around. Then, within the space of a little over a year, Frank missed the deadline for submitting an episode of the show to the TV Academy which cost Barker a shot at an Emmy, and Dorothy Jo passed away. From then on Barker started taking a more active interest in the production of the show, eventually succeeding in getting Marc Breslow thrown off. Then he started boinking Dian, a lawsuit ensued, and he got a bit part in Happy Gilmore. The next thing you know he has visibility as Letterman starts doing jokes about him nailing the models, and his ego becomes distended to the point where it shows up in satellite photos. I wouldn't be a bit surprised if Barker was salivating at the prospect of becoming E.P. long before Frank (who had a heart condition) passed away.

If the allegations about Barker in various court documents are true, I don't know why he isn't sitting in jail right now for suborning perjury.

(Legal disclaimer: All of the above is my personal OPINION.)

Oh, that explains it. (ROLLS EYES AND BOGGLES)

If I'm not mistaken, didn't NBC cancel J!, but gave him a deal where he could create a new show for the network ("Wheel")?

In those days you didn't need a deal to develop a show. They may have given him development money for Wheel but it was likely after they saw the concept.

Not applicable in civil cases. Only applies to criminal cases.

Gotcha.

Isn't that what networks do?

But there are still two Daily Doubles on the board. [ducking]

C'mon, Mark--that's a joke I would do (I managed to show remarkable restraint in not doing it). You're better than that. :)

Doug

But are they true Daily Doubles, Mark? [diving for cover]

*fires wildly* DIE, BAD JOKES, DIE!

*fires wildly* DIE, BAD QUOTING, DIE!

Alright, alright...I'll fix it. You happy?

Uh...whoosh?

Teasing, man. Just teasing.

I know.

Uh...right...

This moment never happened. :)

She appeared today on "The View" (November 1st) -- have not seen her on other shows.....but sounds like she told the same story. Yes she is heavier, but she still looks great. She said that all the cases had been settled, but that the Linda Riegart (sp) case would go to trial.

Leave it to Holly to stick it to her former employers by appearing on a show that directly competes with them.