Howie Mandel took the stage to promote the debut of The Price Is Right Tonight.Citytv/Supplied
At a recent entertainment industry event in Ottawa, Howie Mandel took the stage to promote the debut of The Price Is Right Tonight. He casually told the audience the new Canadian show was giving away a car that very night, and threw out a few raffle numbers.
The crowd instantly forgot their drinks and checked their lanyards for tickets. But they didn’t find any. There would be no free car; Mandel was testing a joke.
“He loves those awkward moments,” says Claire Adams, director of Rogers Studios and in-house productions at Rogers Sports & Media. “He, more than anyone I’ve ever worked with, is never afraid to try something new.”
That instinct has carried 70-year-old Mandel through a decades-long career that began with stand-up in his hometown of Toronto and eventually took him to Los Angeles. Now, he’s got a new gig: hosting The Price is Right Tonight, which premiered on CITY-TV March 6.
Canadian comedian and actor Howie Mandel speaks at the Prime Time screen and media industry conference in Ottawa in January.PATRICK DOYLE/The Canadian Press
The series, which is filmed in Toronto, is Rogers Sports & Media’s prime-time reinvention of the American classic. Mandel grew up watching the original with his mother but, despite all of his years in California, had never visited its set.
“It’s like going to a museum and seeing something you’ve only read about or watched,” Mandel says.
That sense of nostalgia is what Rogers Sports & Media is counting on, as Canadian broadcasters try to rebuild audience habits around large, shared viewing experiences. In recent years, Rogers has pursued more popular franchises and live-event television, launching shows such as Canada’s Got Talent and Law & Order Toronto: Criminal Intent, while leaning on familiar channels such as HGTV and Food Network, which the company acquired and relaunched in January, 2025 in a deal with Warner Bros. Discovery.
A prime-time version of The Price Is Right fits into that strategy as something that’s both recognizable and expandable.
For Mandel, the appeal was the chance to rethink the format rather than simply replicate it.
“It’s not just a Canadian version,” he says. “It’s an amped-up prime-time version of the iconic game show.”
Mandel knows a thing or two about what it takes to make a game show iconic. He was the host of Deal or No Deal and has been a long-running judge on both America’s Got Talent and Canada’s Got Talent.
Television producer Simon Cowell poses with fellow judges from America's Got Talent Heidi Klum, Howie Mandel and Mel B after unveiling Cowell's star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in Los Angeles on Aug. 22, 2018.MARIO ANZUONI/Reuters
But all of that almost didn’t happen. When Mandel was offered Deal or No Deal in the early 2000s, he declined several times, thinking it would hurt his career.
“I thought being a game-show host was embarrassing,” he says.
At the time, work was slow and stand-up bookings were thinning out. Mandel assumed the business had moved on without him. Eventually, his wife Terry Mandel persuaded him to take the gig. When Deal or No Deal premiered in 2005, it didn’t just revive Mandel’s career – it kicked off his next chapter.
Looking back, he says he found standing beside contestants as they made life-changing decisions oddly addictive.
“It’s the most exciting thing on earth.”
Between hosting gigs, he has continued touring as a stand-up comedian, bouncing between stages, recording booths and television studios. Mandel has been open over the years about living with obsessive compulsive disorder and anxiety, and the packed schedule he maintains is part of how he manages.
“I try to stay busy,” Mandel says. “If I decompress, it gets quiet and then I’m in my own head. That’s not a great place for me to be.”
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The host rehearsed the mechanics of The Price is Right Tonight’s games for months with showrunner Don Weiner before stepping onto the Toronto stage at the CBC building in Toronto. He wanted to ensure he never had to think about the rules once the cameras started rolling, so that he could instead focus on his favourite part: the contestants.
The Canadian set is grander than its American cousin. Iconic games, including the Plinko board and the Showcase wheel, have been built to be more theatrical than the daytime versions. Mandel jokes that the size of the stage helps keep him moving, something he prefers given his well-documented aversion to germs and unnecessary contact.
Behind the scenes, the production represents something unusual in Canadian television: a large-scale game show financed domestically by a private broadcaster. Unlike scripted dramas, game shows in Canada typically don’t qualify for many incentives such as tax credits and funding programs. As a result, the genre has historically been difficult to finance domestically. The Price Is Right Tonight, however, is a 100-per-cent Rogers investment. Adams hopes the show proves Canadian broadcasters can build large entertainment formats at home and potentially export them later.
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Mandel says launching a production of this scale in Toronto also carries a certain pride, particularly because the contestants and stories come from the country he grew up in.
As do the prizes. More than 60 per cent of the featured businesses are Canadian-owned, according to Rogers, with the rest coming through Canadian distributors. That includes everything from travel partners and major retailers to smaller companies.
“Prime time is powerful real estate,” Adams says. “If we’re going to create a big, joyful, celebratory show, we also wanted to use the spotlight to champion Canadian innovation, Canadian founders and Canadian success stories.”
And it doesn’t stop there. Ashley Callingbull, the show’s prize presenter, also worked with producers to highlight Indigenous designers and Canadian jewellery brands through wardrobe and styling.
“To be showcasing that I’m an Indigenous woman on such a major program, representation really is everything,” says Callingbull, who is Cree.
Rounding out the on-air team is sports broadcaster Ben Shulman, who serves as the show’s announcer.
“This is a whole new world,” he says. “The most fun part about my regular job is working on something that brings joy and happiness into people’s lives. Game shows do a very similar thing.”
After decades in television, it’s that human connection that keeps Mandel hosting game shows.
“As a kid who grew up and didn’t do great in school and didn’t have a lot of friends and wasn’t invited to the party, to be asked to show up somewhere where strangers want to come and listen to me seems like a blessing,” he says.