Working two jobs? Drew Carey's game

LOS ANGELES — A poll of one television comic was taken. He was asked this question: Would you like to return to work on television?

That comedian, Drew Carey, answered "No."

He was 100 percent wrong. Carey is not only going back to work on television, he has two shows. His new CBS game show "Power of 10" debuts Tuesday night. Players have to guess within percentage points as to how Americans responded to a variety of questions. The top prize is $10 million.

And in the fall, Carey takes over as the new host for the CBS daytime game show "The Price Is Right."

This puts Carey back in the same heavy schedule he had when "The Drew Carey Show" and "Whose Line Is It Anyway?" were on the air at the same time.

"I didn't want to do TV ever for the rest of my life. I was done with it. I didn't want to have anything to do with television, unless it was like that Travel Channel show I did just for fun. That was just a way for me to get to all the soccer games of the World Cup, more than to do a show," Carey says. "My manager, Richard Baker, calls me about other business, and we were talking about different stuff.

"He said, 'Oh, by the way, I know this is a pass, but Michael Davies called, and he's interested in some kind of news-quiz game show. Would you be interested?' "

Carey decided to call Davies, the man behind "Who Wants to be a Millionaire." It was the responses to the poll questions that finally persuaded Carey to get back into the television grind.

He was intrigued by poll responses such as these:

• Only 12 percent of Americans outside California know the name of their governor. That percentage goes up to 20 percent when you add in California.

• A total of 69 percent say that if they saw a Mexican citizen trying to illegally cross the border they would telephone the police.

• Eighteen percent of those polled will never vote for a black person for president.

So what do these poll questions say about Americans?

"Well, they really do take you out of your comfort zone a lot of times, because you're going to see that a lot of people don't think the same way as you do and don't have the same beliefs that you do," Carey says. "I hope it makes people think about that stuff. It's going to shake a lot of people's beliefs."