‘The Price Is Right’ Interview: Drew Carey on Games for 10,000th Episode, Milestone (Exclusive)

Drew Carey Talks 10,000th ‘Price Is Right’ Episode: ‘It’s Such an Honor’

Drew Carey on The Price is Right
Sonja Flemming / CBS

There aren’t many shows that can even dream of reaching 10,000 episodes, but The Price Is Right celebrates that illustrious milestone with February 26’s daytime episode. To honor this rare feat, the show is breaking out some super-sized prizes.

“Everything’s being played for $10,000,” Drew Carey explains to TV Insider. “That number 10,000 is going to be factored in a lot of games… The money’s huge. It’s just a bananas, really expensive show.”

The games that are being played have since been revealed and include favorites like Grande Game, Any Number, and Lucky Seven — with all three honoring the occasion. According to Carey, those games were chosen for a specific reason: They’re “Winnable, winnable, winnable,” he says. “Nothing too hard, nothing too easy.” (This is why the list doesn’t include Stack the Deck, which is notoriously difficult to win, or Cliff Hangers, which is among the easiest.)

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Carey took over as host of the long-lived gameshow after Bob Barker‘s retirement, with his first episode airing on October 15, 2007.

Now, with almost two decades under his belt, he feels privileged to help the show make it to this landmark. “It means everything,” he says of emceeing the 10,000th episode. “It’s such an honor to be on the show in the first place. I hate to use words like ‘institution’ for a TV show, but it really is. I just can’t imagine it going anywhere, even though I know realistically, things change, and not everything lasts.”

He also plans to see it through for the next 10,000 episodes. “I really appreciate the trust that CBS and Freemantle and then the fans put in me.

For so many people, this show is like a touchstone for them. They watched it with their relatives, or their grandma, or they learned English — there’s always something that connected The Price Is Right to so many people,” he says. “As long as I’m healthy and I can make it out there and physically do the job, I’ll keep doing it.”

“It’s so much fun,” Carey adds. “I get plenty of time off to travel and enjoy my life, and even during the week, I get four-day weekends, usually every month, I get like a week or 10 days off in a row. It’s like a better than any job… I’d be an idiot [to quit].”

The Price Is Right, Weekdays, check local listings