NEW YORK—Venerable television game show The Newlywed Game—known since its 1967 debut for embarrassing newly married couples within an inch of their lives—is set to prove it can keep up with the times by hosting its first-ever gay couple later this fall.
George Takei, who played Mr. Sulu in the original Star Trek series and more recently had a recurring role as Kaito Nakamura on the NBC series Heroes, expects to tape a segment soon with new husband Brad Altman. According to a spokeswoman for GSN, the network on which The Newlywed Game has appeared for the past two years, the show will broadcast in October.
Takei and Altman have been life partners for 22 years. They married in Los Angeles in September 2008, before Proposition 8 amended the California state constitution to define marriage as a union of one man and one woman. According to rules that have governed The Newlywed Show since it debuted in prime time on ABC, all participants must be legally married.
Over the show’s 42-year history, it has made other attempts to keep up with changing social mores. Older couples, interracial couples and couples who lived together before marriage all have been contestants. The show also has a new host: Singer Carnie Wilson replaced the iconic, slyly lascivious original host, Bob Eubanks.
“It seems like the show has always reflected the times in terms of marriages depicted, and this felt like the next logical step,” GSN Programming Chief Kelly Goode told the Associated Press.
Conservatives see the move as anything but logical. Culture and Media Institute Vice President Dan Gainor said he saw nothing but a publicity stunt coupled with political grandstanding in the show’s promotion of a homosexual agenda.
“They’re trying to use TV and the movies to set the gay agenda and make it mainstream,” he told the AP.
Wilson disagrees.
“It’s needed at this point,” she told the AP. “To me, this is not anything political. This is not a political statement. This show has always been about couples and how well they know each other.”
Takei and Altman said they have been paying extra attention to the “little things” about each other in preparation for their appearance.
“What we want is to display the normality and the joy of having a happy union,” Takei, 72, told the AP. “To be included in something we never felt we’d be included in is very satisfying.”
