Chuck Barris, the man behind TV’s “The Dating Game,” poses in the lobby of his apartment in New York in 2002. (Bebeto Matthews/AP)From his boundary-pushing game shows to his strange claims of being a CIA assassin, Chuck Barris lived large. The host of “The Gong Show” and the creative force behind “The Dating Game,” “The Newlywed Game” and many other game shows died Tuesday at 87 in Palisades, N.Y., his publicist announced. “Critics had harassed me for 15 years saying that I’d lowered the bar of civilization,” Barris told the A.V. Many point to Barris’s television output as a precursor today’s reality landscape with shows like “America’s Got Talent” and “American Idol.”“I think anything would have been possible without my shows,” Barris told A.V.

Source: Washington Post March 22, 2017 09:59 UTC