Marc Summers and the Never-ending Obstacle Course
A beacon of nostalgia, the host of the euphoric late-’80s kids game show ‘Double Dare’ is back with Nickelodeon for a 2019 reboot—but the intervening years haven’t been as easy as his famously sunny demeanor would suggestMarc Summers and the Never-ending Obstacle Course
A beacon of nostalgia, the host of the euphoric late-’80s kids game show ‘Double Dare’ is back with Nickelodeon for a 2019 reboot—but the intervening years haven’t been as easy as his famously sunny demeanor would suggest
“And then over here is the nose,” Marc Summers says, introducing the oversize orifice for approximately the 1,037th time since Double Dare debuted on Nickelodeon in 1986. He gestures to a handful of 20-something men on stage clutching beers, as he drapes his arm over one nostril. A fan in a robin’s-egg blue Rocko’s Modern Life T-shirt takes it upon himself to pick the nose, which is not yet oozing with lime-green slime.
It’s the week before Thanksgiving, and several inches of snow coat the roads in Newark, New Jersey, an early-season storm that’s essentially shut down the tristate area, as Summers greets the “dedicated humans” who made it out to the second night of his Double Dare Live tour stop at the New Jersey Performing Arts Center. Before the show, which involves a series of physical challenges and a tense game of musical pies before the familiar Double Dare–style segment, Summers invites VIP fans onstage and cheerfully promises them he’ll pose for however many pictures they want. Selfies abound. Meanwhile, a 7-year-old boy sprints through the obstacles again and again, continuously dislodging the Velcro teeth from their gums; a man in his 30s wearing a gray suit does the same, hoisting himself up a wall and smashing through bricks. Eventually, Summers puts on a black blazer and walks out to a small but screaming crowd to bellow out the words anyone who grew up with a TV set in the ’80s or ’90s would recognize. “On your mark, get set, go!”
At 67, Summers is plunging ahead in a career that’s been perhaps one-third slime, one-third Food Network, and one-third sheer toughness. The veteran game-show host left the stand-up circuit in the mid-’80s and rose to fame as the face of Nickelodeon’s Double Dare, and then What Would You Do?, before switching networks and adding producing to his résumé. He’s since made stops along the way at channels like Lifetime and the History Channel, before trying his hand at theater in a one-man show in Indiana. Now, Summers is returning to the familiar: The Double Dare live tour is meant to promote Nickelodeon’s televised reboot, which is finishing its first season, and in which Summers does color commentary alongside new host Liza Koshy, a 22-year-old YouTube influencer. (“I have no idea what that word means,” Summers offers of her title.)
In 2019, Summers’s enduring charm is a breath of fresh air in a media landscape saturated with cynicism and rote reboots. He’s reviving his old-school appeal for a new generation of Nickelodeon viewers—often the kids of the kids who watched him all those years ago. Summers is familiar in that sense, just like Double Dare is: the same dad jokes, the same spiffy dude in white sneakers in the middle of a complete mess. The key, those around him insist, is that he’s just being himself. It’s a lesson Summers picked up from his late idol turned mentor, Soupy Sales. “The same guy onstage was the same guy offstage, and I like to think that’s the same with me,” Summers says. “I think what you see is what you get.” But beneath the warm comfort in the consistency of his personality and presence, there’s plenty more worth exploring, as Summers settles in again on his home network. He’s not just a Nick and Food Network elder statesman; he’s also a Magic Castle–vetted magician, smoked salmon salesman, and former Mary Tyler Moore Show page and Lifetime talk-show host, among many other odd jobs (a DJ and a wet-T-shirt-contest judge, to name a couple). And his life outside work has often been darker than his sunny demeanor would suggest.
Summers, née Berkowitz, long wanted to be in television—after he decided not to be a rabbi, that is—but he never imagined working with kids until he took an audition that a ventriloquist buddy of his passed on for a little-known network called Nickelodeon. They shot the pilot for Double Dare in a basement. The cast and crew would hole up at a Four Seasons in Philadelphia, congregating in someone’s room each night to review the day’s footage. “It was like being in a college dorm,” Summers says. In Newark, none of the charisma of his early tapes is gone. He builds conversation onstage by looking kids in the eye and addressing them the same way he does adults. “What do you do for a living?” he earnestly inquires of a girl who looks to be about 10.
“Whether you’re watching him on television or whether you’re hanging out with him having a slice of pizza, he’s going to be very much the same man, and I believe strongly that’s why we all connected with him so intensely as kids. Because we knew he wasn’t bullshitting us,” says Mathew Klickstein, who wrote Slimed! An Oral History of Nickelodeon’s Golden Age (2013) and has stayed in touch with Summers ever since.
Summers is used to unfavorably comparing himself with the likes of David Letterman and Jay Leno, with whom he shared the stand-up circuit in Los Angeles before their late-night appointments—the latter of whom witnessed Burt Reynolds dumping a mug of water on Summers’s lap on The Tonight Show. “I’ve always thought of myself of being a player in AAA baseball and never quite making the big leagues,” he said in the first cut of On Your Marc, a documentary directed by Klickstein. But his outlook has improved since he embarked on the first leg of the live tour in the fall of 2018. “I didn’t realize what Double Dare, and in some ways, what my performance meant to these people. When people say to me, ‘I grew up watching you. I idolized you. You were my first friend.’ … I really had no idea.”
Whether he realizes it or not, Summers’s Triple-A magnetism is enough to stop major leaguers in their tracks. Summers himself recounts a brief interaction at the White House: “Here comes Michelle [Obama], and I was on my phone looking at emails. And I looked up and there she was. And she said, ‘I know you,’ and I went, ‘I know you too.’” Another time, Lin-Manuel Miranda spotted him at Richard Rodgers Theatre and invited him backstage. “I wanted to talk about Hamilton, and he wanted to talk about Double Dare.” Summers has also tweeted at Miranda to join him for a Double Dare taping, which itself is a reminder for him that seemingly anyone could be open to doing anything for him, and be absolutely thrilled about it. “I throw a marshmallow into a cup, I’m gonna get a standing ovation, you know? It makes me laugh. And because parents can take a ball with a plunger and put it on one side of the stage to the other, they get excited.”
In 2019, Double Dare’s messy, childish escape is perhaps more important than ever—both comforting and cathartic, a necessary reprieve from real life. “It was a time in our life that it feels good to fall back on, and to remember the way you might listen to an old song that you really love, or read an old book, even a children’s book that you might have loved as a younger person, or even just flipping through a photo album,” Klickstein says. “It was also very special that the entire conceit of the show was about doing something you’re not supposed to do.”
The most visceral thrills of Double Dare and later What Would You Do? were born of watching kids and their families mess with each other—and often Summers too. Seeing a grown man have so much fun at work, in a suit and a tie but still at the mercy of rebellious children (and his crew), was aspirational—a promise that adulthood can be carefree and, well, daring. Often, the show’s best candid moments highlighted not the actual children, but the playful, brother-sister dynamic between him and his longtime on-camera assistant, Robin Russo, that developed into a lasting friendship off-set. “Backstage every day was just pure laughter,” she says. “It’s so silly to think about it now, what we were doing, but it just worked.” To be clear, by “it,” Russo is generally referring to Summers tackling her in Lake Double Dare, or slathering Summers in blue gak obstacle after obstacle, while both of them labored to breathe through laughter.
Watching the show’s popularity endure through his stint with Food Network, Summers pushed and pushed for a revival. Now it’s finally here, in full, nostalgia-funneling force: The reboot closed out its first year in late November with a finale starring none other than Kenan and Kel. “I didn’t even imagine, like, getting to be on the stage,” Koshy recently told NBC. “And then to have the honor and the blessing to be able to be here hosting with Marc and be in the moment, it’s so fun. It’s so fun, dude, and I get covered in slime every time.”
Summers hasn’t found the same success in mining nostalgia at his other longtime onscreen home, the Food Network, where he started in 1999. His first big gig was Unwrapped, in which he traveled the country to show audiences the origins of iconic foods from Crunch Bars to Fruity Pebbles. The show, one of the channel’s longest-running, benefited from Summers’s preexisting fan base and launched his career on the network in front of and behind the camera. He went on to take projects that fostered his game-show vibe like Dinner: Impossible and The Next Food Network Star, which spawned the career of Guy Fieri, who refers to Summers as Obi-Wan. “I don’t think I get the respect I deserve from the channel, quite honestly,” Summers says. He mentions that he’s recently talked to the network about reviving Unwrapped as part of a nostalgia-themed week that Emeril would partake in, too, but things apparently haven’t panned out.
“It’s kind of like I don’t exist anymore,” he continues. “People magazine just came out with a 25th-anniversary of Food Network magazine special edition. I have, probably, the longest-running continuous show on Food Network, and they didn’t mention it. Such is life. I don’t need those pats on the back. But I feel more sorry for Emeril. Emeril never really got the dues, the respect he deserved for making that channel what it is.”
Summers’s outspokenness extends to social media, where he manages his own Facebook and Twitter pages himself—he’s into reading comments, playing with Photoshop, and DMing reporters. “Come to the stage door,” he tells me over Messenger, as if I’m not a stranger who sent him an unprompted message a day ago. This is a mostly endearing aspect of his public persona, but the snowy night in Newark proved an exception. He says that the venue refused to cancel the show despite the dangerous road conditions, and initially blamed him to concerned fans hoping to reschedule. (An NJPAC spokesperson says the venue cancels events only when the governor declares a state of emergency or when an artist can’t make it.) “I basically had a gun to my head and hated every minute of what was going on there,” he says. Facing a barrage of negative Facebook comments arguing he personally endangered kids’ safety, Summers exposed a facade in his clumsy, uncle-like persona. He called a couple of commenters “mental midgets” and suggested to another it was “time for [her] meds.”
“Is that sort of a sick way of going about it?” Summers asks, not necessarily looking for an answer. “Was there anger there? You bet your ass there was anger there, OK?”
That Summers, with all his imperfections, is still in the business at all is anything but a given. “He may be one of the longest survivors in the history of television,” the writer of From Scratch: Inside the Food Network, Allen Salkin, once said of him, speaking to his adaptability over decades of TV while hinting at his resolve off-camera. There is, of course, his OCD, of which much has been made, to Summers’s chagrin. To reporters and fans, it was often something to pity, a sign of Summers’s fragility. Oprah Winfrey herself suggested as much in March 1997, when Summers broke ground by disclosing his OCD on her show: “While on the outside he always looked like he was having a lot of fun getting all messy, on the inside he was living a very painful secret,” Oprah said, hyping the segment. Summers says opening up cost him a job hosting a Hollywood Squares reboot the following year, based on rumors that he was “crazy” and hard to work with.
I throw a marshmallow into a cup, I’m gonna get a standing ovation, you know? It makes me laugh.Marc Summers
The OCD was severe, but Summers says he was never secretly miserable getting messy on TV. “Maybe it was therapy that I didn’t even know existed,” he says of being alternately smeared in peanut butter and pelted with whipped cream to earn a living. The medication and therapy he did know existed helped too. Summers says he still has moments when OCD slows him down and he gets caught up, say, reading labels in a grocery store, but that it’s nothing like it used to be. “I don’t want anybody to pity me,” he says.
News of another of the host’s longtime medical struggles wasn’t shared as widely: his cancer. After learning his diagnosis of chronic lymphocytic leukemia about a decade ago, Summers and his wife, Alice, sat in a Los Angeles oncologist’s office filling out a mountain of paperwork. When he was done, the doctor wanted to take a bone marrow biopsy. “I started to walk toward the door, and my wife said, ‘Where are you going?’ And I said, ‘I can’t do cancer. I just want to go home and die.’ And I left.” Summers doubted whether he was strong enough to go through with treatment, but persuaded by his doctor and his wife, two days later he walked back in and took a needle to his pelvis. He went on to get two years of chemotherapy, under the fog of depression for about half of that time.
Summers’s cancer returned in the fall of 2017, prompting another six-month treatment. He’s in remission now, a reprieve from what’s been a decade eerily full of near-death experiences. Like in 2012, when Summers was riding without a seat belt in the back of a cab in Philly when it hydroplaned on I-95, sending him crashing into the car’s partition. He underwent surgeries to repair his face and lost about 70 percent of his memory, which took about a year to regain. “If I get the opportunity to host anything, can I even do it?” he wondered at the time. “Will I remember how this works?”
Summers has been doling out motivational speeches—whether it be to groups of aspiring DJs or broadcasters—for ages, but he acknowledges that these more recent experiences have made them a bit easier to deliver. “I’m not as lackadaisical about what life is about as I might’ve been prior to those things happening to me,” he says. Even with a lot of current projects in the works—Double Dare, a potential revival of his one-man show, Broadway prospects (he’s waiting to hear back on an audition he did for Waitress), documentaries—he tries to avoid making business his life. Despite feeling perpetually out of place in L.A., aside from having a go-to Jewish deli, he and Alice moved out there in 2017 to be closer to their grown kids, Meredith and Matthew, and Matthew’s 4-year-old son, Oliver. Summers and his wife make a point to babysit their grandson a couple of times a week. One day, once his schedule cools off a bit, he hopes to coach Oliver’s baseball team. He did, after all, make time to lead Matthew’s squad for eight years, even when it took 6 a.m. flights between coasts to make a late-morning game. That sort of dedication is standard for Summers.
“Marc is relentless in his pursuit of success. He doesn’t take no for an answer,” Russo says. “And he’s usually pretty right on. He has more energy than my two kids put together.” Once an all-star third baseman and catcher on his own team growing up, he seemingly can’t help but put the same effort into even recreation that he does into work. “The most frightening thing I ever did was throw the first pitch out at Fenway Park,” Summers, a decades-long Red Sox fan, says, “because if you don’t get it across the plate, the crowd will kill you. I practiced for three months throwing balls. The morning of that game, I got up, went to a sporting goods store, bought 25 baseballs, found a park, and just threw baseballs for, like, two hours that morning. … I have something called obsessive-compulsive disorder.”
“I always want to be better. I always want to learn something,” Summers tells me—though, if he’s being honest, his drive always comes back to one thing: “I’m pretty lucky to be alive.”
On July 19, 2003, after playing catch with a player in foul territory, Summers walked to the mound in a white Red Sox jersey, blue jeans, and Sambas. He kept his head down, turning the baseball over in his hand. The second the announcer finished introducing him, he wound up and fired. The pitch sailed a bit high, but crossed home plate. Letting out a brief shout, Summers punched his glove and walked off the mound smiling.