What To Know
- John O’Hurley explained why he left his role as Family Feud host in 2010.
- He also expressed discomfort with the show’s increasing reliance on sexual innuendo.
- O’Hurley received feedback from viewers who were unhappy with the show’s content, prompting him to decide it was time to move on.
John O’Hurley hosted Family Feud from 2006 to 2010 — but why did he decide to leave the game show?
During a 2021 appearance on The Game Show Starring Bradley Clarke podcast, Hurley opened up about the reasons he decided to step away from his hosting duties.
“It was a tough decision, but they were moving the show from shooting in L.A. to shooting down at Universal, down in Florida,” the actor, 71, explained. “I wasn’t really pleased about that because it was tough enough to coordinate the filming of the show with all the other demands that I had, not the least of which was the fact that I was doing quite a bit of Broadway at the time.”
With travel days added into the mix, O’Hurley said his family “didn’t want to do it.”
“So I said, ‘This is the time, probably, when you should pass it on to somebody else,” he shared. “I’ve had my fun with it, and that’s it, time to move on now.’”
Additionally, O’Hurley said that Family Feud “wasn’t the family orientation” that its title suggested by the time his tenure as host ended.
“Everything was looking for the sexual double entendre, all the time, and it was even getting a little too demonstrative,” he pointed out. “And I just felt that this was always a show you could watch with your family… But I was getting so many letters from people all around the country, saying, ‘I can’t watch this with my family anymore. It’s making me answer questions that I don’t want to answer.’”
Before O’Hurley, Richard Dawson helmed Family Feud for two different stints — from 1976 to 1985 and from 1994 to 1995 — in addition to Ray Combs from 1988 to 1994, Louie Anderson from 1999 to 2002, Richard Karn from 2002 to 2006, and most recently, Steve Harvey from 2010 through today.
Family Feud, Weekdays, Check local listings