> Now that I'm older, I look back on this show, and it strikes me as weirder and wronger and even more confusing. Age has not brought me understanding. I still don't get it. WHAT was that show all about?? I can't figure out why such an otherwise unassuming, *nice* show would have such a creepy undercurrent to it. I can't understand why mainstream, middle-class America so embraced this show.

Erm? Family Feud was hardly unique in its... forwardness. That was quite common in game shows of the time - The Dating Game, the original Hollywood Squares, and the king of all lewd game shows, Match Game. They all had different kinds of lewdness, but, honestly; Match Game was scarcely anything but an excuse to get a bunch of celebrities together to tell dirty jokes and make crude sexual comments. Hollywood Squares was basically the same (not the dumbed-down eighties version or the entirely-scripted recent revival, mind). As someone else has mentioned, The Price is Right features studly Bob Barker and a bunch of scantily-clad hotties (and ultra-sexy Rod Roddy ;-}).

What's my point? Not sure. I think daytime game shows back then were probably erotic escapism for housewives more than anything else. I'm sure they didn't draw a terrifically large crowd of adult male viewers.

It's true that they're much less sexual nowadays. Our society is much less tolerant of that than in the late seventies.