The Real American Idol

The job of savior is already filled, and it’s not by the faces on the bills in your wallet.

Think back to your childhood. Do you remember the pleasures of being sick on a school day?

Not really sick, of course. Just sick enough to spike a degree or two of fever. If you could show your parents that silvery line of mercury hovering higher than 98.6 on the thermometer, you got to stay home from school.

Some of us who grew up before on-demand entertainment remember how daytime TV was quite different from the Saturday morning cartoons we knew so well. When you were home sick from school, daytime TV was a revelation.

Most of the images that flickered on our TV screens belonged to soap operas. But there was another type of program during the daytime hours: game shows.

One enduring game show of that era was Let’s Make a Deal, with Monty Hall. (That long-running show is still a daytime TV staple, although with a different host.) Winning contestants chose their prize blindly: whatever was behind door number one, door number two or door number three.

If they were lucky,...