The Luckiest Man in America (2024) - A Review

It’s 1984 and Michael Larson (Paul Walter Hauser) has arrived on the lot of CBS Studios and is set to appear as a contestant on the popular game show Press Your Luck.

Larson appears to be kind of an odd guy. Everyone gets an an unusual vibe about him, but executive producer Bill Carruthers (David Stathairn) thinks Larson’s story of being an ice cream truck driver and him driving all the way out from Ohio to California with hopes of being on the show makes for a fascinating story that television audiences will enjoy.

Gradually, Larson’s slow-witted, innocent persona drops away and his real skills become apparent. The game starts and he begins to rack up more and more money against the big electronic board. He’s avoiding every whammy, is winning boatloads of cash and is leaving the other contestants in the dust.

Larson came to Press Your Luck with a mission – win the game and win it big! It turns out he’s memorized the light patterns of the ominous Big Board. Now that he managed to get cast as a contestant, he is breaking CBS’ bank and all the producers and network execs can do is sit, watch and hope Larson either makes a mistake or decides to stop.

Larson and the Press Your Luck game show scandal has always been an entertaining story and is one of the most famous game show scandals in television history. I really enjoyed the Game Show Network’s documentary Big Bucks: The Press Your Luck Scandal about Larson and the famous episode that was aired in 2003. I wrote my own blog about the scandal just because I was always fascinated by the story. I’ve always been kind of waiting for a film to be made about it one day.

Hauser is the focus in the film and excels at making Larson a compelling, quirky character. Despite his bizarre behavior and his lack of social skills, you do start to root for the guy. He says he’s doing this all for his wife and daughter, but we learn it’s not as an idyllic home life as he describes. Winning the game and finally getting a lot of money is a desperate hope he can repair a lot in his life that is broken.

Also, he’s not necessarily cheating in any way at playing the game. He studied hours of VHS episodes of Press Your luck, found a flaw in the game and figured out how to exploit it. Of course the audience is going to cheer for him! Win as much as you can Mike!

The rest of the cast does a good job as well. David Strathairn, Shamier Anderson, Walter Goggins as Press Your Luck Host Peter Tomarken. They play the drama and worry that was flooding through the studio that day.

One thing that The Luckiest Man in America does very well is take you back to the television era of 1984. The older equipment, the tacky and colorful fashion styles, the old style and format of game shows from the era. How tacky are those little whammy cartoons that used to pop up on the screen?

This was when a bunch of flashing lights in a soundstage could generate thunderous applause and contestants would constantly yell, “Big Bucks!” and “No Whammies!” at the top of their lungs. It was fun revisiting that era. When the film settles into the game show studio with Larson strategically playing the game and the control room of shocked producers reacting to it that’s where it excels.

As with most docudramas, there are some creative licenses taken to tell this tale. One subplot is Strathairn’s producer trying to save his job – since he was the one who approved Larson as a contestant. Someone has to be blamed for this fiasco. So, he has to attempt to pass the blame onto someone else – and it ultimately leads to a very cold, tense scenario. Unfortunately, that story lines just kind of ends with no real resolution between Strathairn and who he pins to take the fall for his mistake.

When the story strays away from the game show set things become less interesting. There are some very fictionalized scenarios created. While the taping of the show is halted, Larson gets to step out from the gameplay and where the film follows him is not very exciting and awkwardly tries to enlighten us more about him.

There’s one surreal sequence where Larson stumbles onto a talk show being filmed at the studio. This is where Johnny Knoxville appears who plays the talk show host. We’re meant to learn more about Larson’s past and his motivations as to why he decided to do all this, but the whole sequence punctures the tension and drama of this game show shocker that is been spiraling out of control. It was an engrossing story, played almost in real time in the film. The outside excursions brings things to a standstill. The film does a wonderful job of telling this story in this contained space with the cast, it didn’t need to add any misadventures from the game show taping.

I think it could have been more effective to convey Larson’s backstory in a better way. Had the entire film taken place on the Press Your Luck stage, with contestants, audience members, the crew each reacting to what was happening and producers learning more and more behind the scenes about who exactly Larson is as he continues to press his luck and winning more and more money, I would have been quite fine with that. The producers are basically being held hostage by Larson’s winning streak. They even have to turn his single planed episode of the game into two episodes since he’s not getting whammied out!

Larson was such an intelligent, eccentric, peculiar individual, I didn’t expect the film to cover his whole life. However, I would have liked had the film given more of an idea of just how much time Larson had spent studying the show and how obsessed he was in breaking the Press Your Luck game.

In real life, Larson spent countless nights studying VHS tapes of Press Your Luck. Slowing the show down, drawing diagrams, trying to memorize the patterns of the lights, of what was then considered the hi-tech Big Board. The film doesn’t show us any of his preparations, we just learn that he has a bag full of VHS tapes in his ice cream truck and put it together as to what he’s doing and how he did it.

Oddly enough, there’s no post-script at the end of the film of what became of Larson or the fallout of the Press Your Luck scandal. I was very surprised by that. I was expecting a short follow-up indicating that Larson’s real story didn’t have a very happy ending. But, I suppose that wouldn’t align with the ‘underdog story’ the film wants to tell.

The Luckiest Man in America would make a nice companion piece to Quiz Show – a game show scandal double-feature!

The film has some flaws, but it is such an entertaining story, has such a great performance by Hauser anchoring it and captures that era of ’80s game show fever, it’s a treat to watch. It might not dive into the details of the scandal as much as the Game Show Network’s documentary about it, but it does a good job dramatizing the events of that day on the set of Press Your Luck where Michael Larson would make game show history.