in early 1972, mark goodson and bill todman began shopping a modernized revival of "the price is right" to stations, with dennis james as host. cbs expressed interest in the series, on one condition: instead of james, barker would be installed as host. after some initial resistance, barker instead offered to host another upcoming cbs game show, jack barry's "the joker's wild" (which had difficulty finding a host and was scheduled to debut the same day as "price") to allow james to host "price", but cbs rejected this proposal.