Queen For A Day Returns to Television, Live.

The Iconic Precursor of Reality Television, Born in the 1940s, Proves Especially Relevant in the 21(st) Century

Queen For A Day Debuted "Out of Town" and Took the Network Time Period from Last to First

LOS ANGELES -- The term "reality television" had not yet been coined when the embodiment of it called Queen For A Day made its network television debut in 1956 on NBC and ended its run in 1964 on ABC. Five and a half decades later, it has returned to network TV for the third time, now in a live format, and has proven to be even more relevant in the 21st century.

Back in the day: Jack Bailey hosted Queen For A Day. Five and a half decades later it has returned to Network Television. (Photo: Business Wire)

Queen For A Day recently completed its first run of weekly one-hour shows, broadcast live over 10 weeks in prime time on Univision Puerto Rico from a 500-seat theater in San Juan. It debuted Sunday, February 6, 2011. Nielsen People Meter tracking through all ten shows in the series saw Queen For A Day grow its time period with women 25-54 by 272% and attain a 30 share.

What's more, Univision Puerto Rico aired six encore episodes and held 90% of the original household share with two episodes actually delivering higher household shares than the originals.

"I wanted to make sure we had a hit. It was decided to open Queen For A Day, 'out of town,' so we could work out all the bugs before bringing it to the U.S.," said Michael Wortsman, sole rights and trademark owner of Queen For A Day. "We took a page out of the Broadway play book and made our mistakes out of town while fine tuning Queen For A Day for its U.S. debut. From day one, our changes made it progressively better. It's ready now."

A "Q Score" research study using a U.S. national sample of women 25-54 revealed the Queen For A Day concept scored higher than Project Runway and Real Housewives of New York. And even though the majority of women had never heard of Queen For A Day, 85% liked the title.

"Historically, the fundamentals of Queen For A Day set in motion the formula for some of the most successful, current reality television franchises, including the recruitment of participants with compelling stories, an opportunity for audience interaction via texting and the Internet and affording advertisers opportunities for relevant product integration," said Wortsman.

Back in the day, the show was broadcast from the Moulin Rouge in Hollywood. Audience members would be picked to share their story of why they deserved the honor of being Queen For A Day. Women revealed their most personal struggles and would make their emotional case to the crowd and then be subject to the very technical "applause-o-meter" and a winner would be crowned and gifted with prizes.

Today, Queen For A Day is a one-hour, prime time live show that runs for 10 weeks and includes elements from American Idol (judges) and The Apprentice (weekly missions). Week One begins with 21 women competing for the opportunity to be a weekly Queen For A Day and from there eliminated down to the Week Ten finale with the crowning of Queen For A Day 2011.

"As a brand, Queen for a Day has worldwide recognition, stature and historical significance and is ideal for advertisers who desire to strongly connect with consumers. Queen For A Day is a relevant and seamless way to integrate appropriate lifestyle products into the show in support of ad campaigns and product launches. Consumers who see others becoming excited about a product or service can stimulate a desire to want it too. And in some cases, the gifts contestants receive can be life changing. And that's powerful," Wortsman said.

Feedback from the Puerto Rican community has been visceral and readily apparent as various mayors of cities around San Juan have presented awards of merit to the "Queens" for their public works as part of their participation in the show.

As a property, Queen For A Day can be cast and produced for multiple demos and formats (domestically and internationally), significantly increasing the ability to integrate multiple advertisers in genre-specific formats, offering more meaningful interactions with consumers. In addition, this scalability provides the ability to work with multiple networks within various budget parameters and programming capacities in order to launch the series in prime time, day time, first run syndication, etc.

Entertainment industry executive Michael Wortsman is the executive producer of Queen For a Day through his production company HollywoodLaundromat.com, Inc. and owns the worldwide rights to the show and its trademark. Wortsman is the former President of the Univision Television Group and while there acquired the Spanish language rights to the legendary game show, Let's Make A Deal and produced over 500 episodes.

Photos available upon request.

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