Delayed Reaction: Perfect Bid: The Contestant Who Knew Too Much

The Pitch: You are not going to believe this The Price is Right fan.

A documentary about an infamous The Price is Right Fan.

72 minutes is a weird runtime for a documentary. I'm used to seeing shorter runtimes for docs that were made for TV series like CNN's assorted series or PBS's American Experience. I've been conditioned to expect a feature to be at least 90 minutes. 72 minutes is odd. That tells me they tried to find enough to made it feature length but couldn't. That's very much the case with Perfect Bid. There's a lot of padding. Most notably, there's the story of the Price is Right producer whose fans were suspected as the source of the controversial perfect bid.

That's not to say this isn't a good story. Ted Slauson is an interesting character, and the movie is structured deceptively well. It's like an essay that save its thesis until the end. Because, really, the argument of the movie is that Ted is responsible for the perfect bid, not Terry Kniess, the contestant who actually won the game. Most of the movie builds up Slauson and proves his credentials. It gives decades of documented evidence that he is a superfan who could feasibly get a Showcase Showdown bid exactly right. Only after giving all the evidence does it explore the question of where the perfect bid came from. So, when they pull up interviews of Terry Kniess taking credit for his perfect bid, it's not remotely believable.

Normally, I complain about what I call "thesis documentaries". I'd rather see an exploration of a topic than lecture trying to prove a point. I didn't mind it as much in The Perfect Bid because of how it's structure. It's trying to prove a point and certainly lays out a biased argument, but by essentially saving the thesis for the end, I was able to feel like I

reached that conclusion on my own first.

Verdict: Weakly Recommend