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Growing up in Iowa, Ashton Kutcher used to watch game shows on television and wish that he could be a contestant.
But, as the actor/producer says, “My family wasn’t taking trips to L.A, so I wasn’t going to be in the studio audience and get picked. This show eliminates that part of the process. We come to you.”
As he says this, it’s late Saturday afternoon, and Kutcher is sitting in a director’s chair on the front lawn of a small house on a normally quiet street in Torrance, Calif., south of Los Angeles.
The family that lives in the home has been sequestered while a small army of trucks and production crew swarms into the neighborhood and erects a game-show set in the street in front of the house.
When it gets dark, the family will be brought back to meet a crowd of eager friends, relatives and neighbors and compete for cash and prizes in “Opportunity Knocks,” a game show premiering tonight on ABC.
Kutcher is executive producer of the show, along with Jason Goldberg, Karey Burke, Todd A. Nelson and host JD Roth.
“The dream of this show is it can happen,” Kutcher says. “It really can happen. Look at where we are. We’re in somebody’s neighborhood. There are kids watching down the street. They’re sitting here going, ‘Maybe next week, they’re going to come to my house.’ ”
To win on “Opportunity Knocks,” the family members are going to have to answer questions about each other.
“At the heart of the show,” Kutcher says, “the core of it is, ‘How well do you know your family?’ ”
When he first heard the pitch for the concept, Kutcher says he went home and tried a version of it around the dinner table with his wife, actress Demi Moore, and his stepdaughters from Moore’s marriage to Bruce Willis.
“At the end of it,” he says, “we had a great dinner, and we all knew a little more about each other, which is great. At its true essence, you should know your family. You should know them intimately. And we take our own family for granted a lot of the time.”
As the sun sinks low in the sky, Roth finishes a rehearsal run, grabs a hamburger from the cookout provided for the neighborhood and sits down to talk.
Although he’s been a producer or host on several shows, Roth says, “This one’s special, though. It’s such a warm hug. You get to be there and be part of the family, people who really do deserve it. People are so thankful that you’re in their neighborhood.”
In picking families, Roth says he and his partners avoid families that fit into showbiz stereotypes.
Of today’s family, he says, “This guy is the first person in his family to go to college. All he wants is for his kids to go to college. These are the families I try to find.”
Kutcher says: “We’ve been very fortunate, because the families we’ve seen across the country have been like the Beaver’s. It’s really shocking how genuinely Americana America is.”
