Perfect Bid: The Contestant Who Knew Too Much

This is one of those documentaries where the story is more fascinating than the vehicle through which you hear the story. The story is fascinating. The documentary? Ehhhhhhh … The story is one of Ted Slausen, a Price Is Right super-fan, who ended up noticing that prizes repeated, and created and memorized a database of prizes and their values. His own quest to get on the show and win came up dry (he lost at the wheel), but he would continue to go and help contestants by shouting out the exact dollar amounts. This culminated in him helping our someone in the show-ending Showcase Showdown and provided the exact amount, which had never been done before. The story itself, like I said, is interesting. You want to know more about this human calculator, why it mattered to him to help people, and the furor over what happened after the perfect bid. But the documentary isn’t interested in a lot of that. We spend a LOT of time talking about Ted growing up, and the process of getting on the show, and his failed attempt at winning, and his hobbies, and Bob Barker’s retirement, and the executive producer’s departure. By the time you get to the titular event, the doc is almost over. You get some archival comments from host Drew Carey from an interview he did at some other point (and he sounds a bit bitter), but no real inside-baseball point of view, and no aftermath. It happened, the end, thanks for coming, help control the pet population. It’s still an interesting story, and I’d still say it’s worth a watch. But this is surface-level documentary-making. It’s taking the last story on the 5 o’clock news (you know, the pointless human interest story), stretching it out to 70ish minutes, and that’s it. It’s a fun, light-hearted diversion about a weird moment in game show history, and not much else.