In a clamorous world where so many things compete for our attention, Stephen Brown ’81 wants us to slow down — and play a game. As executive vice president of programming and development for Fox Television Stations, he develops and produces reality and game shows that include 25 Words or Less, Dish Nation, Divorce Court, and the new version of a classic game show that was once hosted by Groucho Marx, You Bet Your Life.

Game shows “take you out of the concerns of the world,” Brown says. “You exercise your mind in a different way. And you want to feel a little smarter than the people up on the screen.”

Brown spent several years as an English teacher in his early 20s, an experience he says helped prepare him for a career in a very different line of work. “Standing up in front of 17-year-olds and lecturing about literature gave me the confidence to get into entertainment,” says Brown, who was an English major.

He bought a one-way ticket to Los Angeles in 1990, slept on a friend’s couch for a week, and landed a temp job in the human resources department at Fox. Eventually he became an assistant writer on Love Connection and worked his way up at several production companies. After spending 17 years producing reality and game shows for various outlets — among them Pyramid, Shop ’Til You Drop, and Legends of the Hidden Temple — he returned to Fox in 2005.

Last year, Brown helped launch the streaming network Fox Soul, which focuses on the Black community. In addition to dramas and gospel programs, the network has several talk shows that offer “authentic, unfiltered voices,” Brown says.

In September 2021, Brown brought back the iconic game show You Bet Your Life, which first ran in the 1950s. Now hosted by Jay Leno, the show pairs two strangers and gives them the chance to earn prize money by working together to answer trivia questions.

Brown loves the challenge of developing game shows in a business that has an 80–90% failure rate, he says. Hosts like appearing on them because they are usually filmed on a compressed schedule to make them cost effective. “We film six episodes a day, five days a week” to produce 175 shows in eight weeks for a typical game show, he explains.

The pandemic forced many changes for game shows, but they have persevered with new protocols. Divorce Court has a virtual studio audience, so audience members are filmed at home and appear on the screen in their own square. Meredith Vieira, host of 25 Words or Less, tapes the show from a newly constructed studio in the basement of her New York home while the rest of the production is shot in Los Angeles, with a staff that undergoes frequent COVID-19 testing. The celebrities who compete together to solve the fast-paced word problems appear from separate soundstages. Brown, who used to be in the studio for tapings, now supervises each show remotely from his home in Los Angeles.

In the evenings at home, Brown watches the broadcasts to get a better sense of how the audience experiences each show. “I’m watching as a producer” and contemplating technical issues, he says. When Brown hears his husband laughing at a joke made by Leno or one of the other hosts, he says, “That’s the best moment for me.”