Merv Griffin had a series of overlapping careers in show business as a singer and band leader, then as a talk show host and developer of game shows for television. Griffin's career as a television talk show host was associated from the beginning with that of Johnny Carson, the reigning "king of late-night talk" from the 1960s through the 1980s. Griffin's first daytime talk show on NBC began the same day as Carson's reign on The Tonight Show, and if Carson was consistently rated number one as national talk show host, Griffin was for significant periods of time clearly number two.

     Carson's approach to the television talk show had been forged in the entertainment community of Los Angeles in the mid- 1950s. Griffin, who came to New York to sign a record contract with RCA in the early 1950s, was subject to other influences. He watched such shows as Mike Wallace's Night Beat and David Susskind's Open End and socialized with New York's theater crowd. On his own first ventures into network talk in the mid- and late 1960s, Griffin capitalized on the ferment of the era. As surprising as it might be to those who knew him only from his later tepid shows on Metromedia, the Merv Griffin of the 1960s and early 1970s thrived on controversy. Broadcast historian Hal Erickson may have been somewhat hyperbolic when he credited Griffin with using his "aw-shucks style to accommodate more controversy and makers of controversy than most of the would-be Susskind's combined," but it is true that Griffin booked guests such as journalist Adele Rogers St. John, futurist Buckminster Fuller, writer Norman Mailer, critic Malcolm Muggeridge, and a number of controversial new comedians, including Dick Gregory, Lily Tomlin, Richard Pryor, and George Carlin. In a 1965 Griffin special aired from London, when English philosopher Bertrand Russell issued the strongest indictment up to that time of the growing U.S. involvement in Vietnam, Griffin chided the audience for booing and not letting the English war critic be heard.

     As the late-night television talk show wars heated up between Carson, Joey Bishop, Dick Cavett, and David Frost, Griffin entered the fray in 1969 as CBS's candidate to take on Carson in his own time slot. Griffin immediately ran afoul of network censors with controversial guests and topics. Concerned with the number of statements being made against the war in Vietnam in 1969, CBS lawyers sent Griffin a memo: "In the past six weeks 34 antiwar statements have been made and only one pro-war statement, by John Wayne." Griffin shot back: "Find me someone as famous as Mr. Wayne to speak in favor the war and we'll book him." As Griffin recalls in his autobiography, "The irony of the situation wasn't wasted on me; in 1965 I'm called a traitor by the press for presenting Bertrand Russell, and four years later we were hard­ pressed to find anybody to speak in favor of the Vietnam war." In March 1970 anti war activist Abbie Hoffman visited the show wearing a red, white, and blue shirt that resembled an American flag. Network censors aired the tape but blurred Hoffman's image electronically so that his voice emanated from a "jumble of lines." The censors interfered in other ways as well, insisting Griffin fire sidekick Arthur Treacher because he was too old, or that he not use 18-year-old Desi Arnaz, Jr., as a guest host because he was too young. In each case Griffin resisted the censors, but the effort took its toll.

     By the beginning of 1972, Griffin had had enough. He secretly negotiated a new syndication deal with Metromedia, which gave him a daytime talk show in syndication the first Monday after any day he was fired. (In addition, a penalty clause in his contract with CBS would give him $1 million if he were fired.) With his ratings sagging, CBS predictably lowered the boom, and Griffin went immediately to Metromedia where his daytime talk show ran for another 13 years. In 1986 he retired from the show to devote his time to highly profitable game shows.

     Having learned some hard lessons about controversy, it was in the second arena of the daytime game show that Merv Griffin once again exerted a major influence on commercial television. A self-proclaimed "puzzle freak" since childhood, he began to establish his reputation as a game show developer soon after he launched his network talk show career. Jeopardy!, produced by Griffin's company for NBC in March 1964, became the second-most-successful game show on television. The most successful game show on television, with international editions licensed by Griffin in France, Taiwan, Norway, Peru, and other countries by the early 1990s, was Wheel of Fortune.

     Wheel premiered in January 1975. It is a game show in which three contestants take turns spinning a large wheel for the chance to guess the letters of a mystery word or phrase. The show's first host was Chuck Woolery. Pat Sajak took over in 1982, assisted by Vanna White. Sajak and White have gone on to become household names in the world of television game shows.

     In a largely unflattering portrait, biographer Marshall Blonsky describes Griffin as a financially successful but artistically limited individual. The key to Griffin's character, according to Blonsky, is a desperate drive to be accepted by the rich and powerful, and much of his financial success he owes to his financial manager, Murray Schwartz, whom he has never credited and with whom he parted ways in the late 1980s. However that may be, Merv Griffin did provide controversy and significant competition for Carson and other talk show hosts during his long career on television and has demonstrated what even Blonsky acknowledged to be a genius for creating game shows for television.