Chuck Barris, the creator of television’s long-running “The Dating Game” and “The Newlywed Game” who later hosted the offbeat cult classic “The Gong Show” — and who claimed in a memoir to have been a CIA assassin — died March 21 at his home in Palisades, N.Y. He was 87.
A spokesman, Paul Shefrin, announced the death, but the cause was not disclosed. Mr. Barris had surgery for lung cancer in 2000.
In a career with few parallels in show business, Mr. Barris also wrote a Top 5 pop song, a best-selling novel and was credited — or blamed — for launching a spate of raunchy reality shows that grew out of his creations in the 1960s and 1970s.
He held several jobs in television early in his career. One involved monitoring “American Bandstand” host Dick Clark to make sure he was not taking payola from record companies. He moved to Los Angeles in the early 1960s to be in charge of daytime programming for ABC-TV.
He wrote a song, “Palisades Park,” that reached No. 3 on the Billboard pop charts in 1962 for singer Freddy “Boom Boom” Cannon. Within a few years, Mr. Barris was out of work and had run through his record royalties.
Borrowing money from his family, he formed a production company that introduced a game show in which a young “bachelorette” questioned three young men hidden behind a wall. She then selected one of the men to accompany her on a date. (Occasionally, a man asked questions of three women.)
When “The Dating Game” premiered on ABC in December 1965 (“from Hollywood, the dating capital of the world”), critics called it a new low in television. It was considered crass, demeaning and sexually suggestive — which it was, by design. The show became a hit.
After some responses in the show’s early tapings became too explicit run on the air, Mr. Barris hired a tough-looking actor to stand just offstage. Contestants were told that it was an FBI agent who was there to arrest anyone who cursed or said anything salacious.
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