My parents, who, as I’ve said before, are traveling around the country in an RV and blogging about it over here, are in Los Angeles for the holidays to both visit me and see some sights. I promised them I’d take them to a TV show while they were here, and I faintly remember my mom enjoying Wheel of Fortune daily when my siblings and I were kids, so we traveled over to Sony Pictures Studios in beautiful Culver City (just a mile or so from where I now live in West LA) to see Pat Sajak and Vanna White do the same thing they’ve been doing since the early 80s.

I don’t know how much you know about television shows, but I’ve actually been to a few — I was out here in LA for a few months during college while I was studying broadcasting, and all of my friends basically interned at TV studios, so almost every week we’d go check out a TV taping. I’ve seen tapings of Price is Right (that entire staff is basically Ithaca College alumni, so if you watch the show, Ithaca college students appear as contestants with surprisingly frequency), the old Dennis Miller Show (with guest George Carlin), Tonight Show (Jay Leno era, with Laurence Fishburne as a guest), The Weakest Link, The Man Show, and a few other regularly shot shows out here (all game and talk shows — I haven’t yet been out here while the sitcoms are shooting, not to mention that most of the ones I like aren’t shot in front of an audience anyway). So I’m pretty used to the fact that, when you walk into a TV studio, everything is much smaller than you’d expect it to be.

Of course, maybe you can’t tell that from my pictures. These were all snapped surreptitiously with an iPhone, which was supposed to be turned off at the time. I thought about shooting video of the show, but then thought better of it, so instead, you get these blurry iPhone shots. We actually saw them tape three shows, all of which will be on in March 2010 (during some special “Taste of Europe”-themed week, I guess), and the most fascinating thing about the whole setup (as with most TV shows that have been running for years and years) is just how routine it all is. They move the audience in while prepping the contestants on stage (we couldn’t hear what they were saying, but some production assistant was standing with them, and making motions while she spoke, trying to tell them to be really excited and move as quickly through the game as they could — give a letter, spin the wheel, applaud, give another letter, spin again, so on), and then bring the hosts out, count down, the show’s on as you see it on TV with just a few voiceovers missing, and then they only take commercial breaks of a minute or two. At the end of the show, they sweep the set around for the final puzzle, all of the hosts and contestants know where to stand, and all of the shots are set up ahead of time and put on tape for a few seconds, and then before you can even realize what’s happening, it’s on to the next show, back to prepping contestants and then Pat and Vanna come out again dressed in different clothes for the next day, and so on.

They also made the point a few times to the audience that they couldn’t have them yelling out answers — apparently that’s an issue, especially on the last puzzle with all of the prize money on the line. If anyone in-house yells an answer out, they supposedly trash the puzzle and have to re-tape the segment. But while I did hear a few letters whispered around me, no one yelled anything out, so we didn’t have any delays or problems. I read somewhere before we went that Pat and Vanna are apparently really, really excellent at solving the puzzles, because they’ve been doing it for so long, but I couldn’t see exactly how much information they were fed or guessed themselves. I think Vanna was pretty good — a few times, she’d start walking before things lit up for her, which made me think she’d solved them (though maybe she has a light or display somewhere that I couldn’t see). Sajak usually had to look at something hidden from our view before he said, “Yes, there are two Bs,” so I’m guessing he has a display offstage that tells him how many of each guessed letters there are. A few times, though, he didn’t have to look, so he probably does figure out some of the puzzles before they’re all lit up.

My dad, who is a smart guy, had trouble following just what all was happening, but that’s because the show isn’t for the audience in the theater, it’s for the audience at home that watches the thing every day. There’s no in-depth explanation of the game or long strategy sessions, just lots of buzzes and dings and flashing lights like a casino. I was amazed at just how “background” the show was — Sajak’s dialogue was bland and forgettable, the contestants were chosen to be endearing but tame, and of course Vanna White, who’s over 50 but still had a creepy audience guy in front of us asking if she gave hugs out as prizes, is the definition of surface — stand there, flip letters, smile and clap. We clapped a lot, too — the crew held up applause signs whenever someone spun the wheel, and they told us that whenever Vanna is clapping, we should be, too, “just like at home.”

Sure, that weirded me out a bit (who applauds at game shows at home?), but in general, there was nothing wrong with it — they do it exactly right for what it is. I have seen the show on muted TV screens the past few weeks at the gym, just because it happens to be on when I’m there and I knew I’d be seeing it live in person. But when you sit down and see three shows in a row, and the amount of people and activity that goes into the thing, you’re kind of amazed at how much work goes into something that’s basically designed to be the soundtrack to you cooking dinner or working out.

That older guy is Charlie O’Donnell, who’s been working as announcer on the show longer than even the stars have. He’s had bigger careers as a voice than most people have had with their whole body, and he was entertaining but bored — this was their last taping before the Christmas break, and you could kind of tell that he, like most of the people working there, were ready to go off to Christmas parties or home to their families. The one time he really lit up was reminiscing for a moment about when the show started, and he talked about Dick Clark — he’s done announcing, he said, for everything “Dick” had ever done. The way he said “Dick” was a nice little hint of old Hollywood — speaking so informally about a guy who is really a legend. But then again, it made me realize, as well, that all of the legends end up just being people, too.

Yes, even those two.

The parents liked it, as did I. I have been meaning to see a Craig Ferguson show sometime here — that’ll probably be my next stop in a TV studio. Oh, and I won a T-shirt as a door prize — it was a “Wheel of Fortune at Sea World” shirt from a few years ago. I gave it to my dad. On the way off the lot, we walked in among all of the big soundstage buildings that Sony has set up, and one of them had a “Green Hornet” prop storage sign on it, which was pretty awesome (though Charlie O’Donnell had mentioned earlier that they’d finished shooting there a little while ago, and moved off to the Paramount lot).

I didn’t get a picture of it, unfortunately. A security dude walked by and gave me a look that made me think it wasn’t worth the trouble. My parents and I went on our way to Canter’s for lunch.