(FORTUNE Magazine) – Okay, contestants, it's time to play Smush, the new TV game show. Smush together "he played Don Corleone" with the "fried round pastry favored by cops," and what do you get? That would be MarlonBrandoughnut. Now smush the "chairman of the Federal Reserve" with "a placebo that's supposed to make you horny." Ah, yes. AlanGreenspanishfly.

If you think that's dumb, well, lots of people at ABC felt the same way about Who Wants to Be a Millionaire until an astute British-born executive named Michael Davies persuaded his colleagues to give the show a summer tryout in 1999. Davies felt so strongly about Millionaire that he quit his job at the network to become its executive producer and take a small ownership stake in the show. Smart move. Millionaire has generated more than $500 million in profits for ABC, along with a board game, a best-selling CD-ROM, a Hyperion book, a money-making Website, a cell phone version, and popular play-along attractions at Walt Disney World and Disneyland.

Millionaire has also made the 35-year-old Davies a force in the TV industry as president of his own Disney-financed production company, which makes Smush for cable's USA Network and Two-Minute Drill for ESPN. All this success, however, hasn't won him accolades from his peers. "The rest of the television business looks down on anything that doesn't have a script," Davies laments.

No matter: Davies says game shows are the answer to the $64,000 question: How do you solve television's economic woes? "They're a phenomenal business," he says. He may well be right.

Think of Davies as a Merv Griffin wannabe with an accent. He learned the game-show business from the bottom up, starting as a writer for Let's Make a Deal. ("Hardly one of the noble and ancient professions," sniffed his father, an architect in London.) Undeterred, Davies toiled under game-show moguls Griffin and Dick Clark, and developed cable game shows for Disney. Veteran host Monte Hall told him, "All great game shows come down to one dramatic moment when the contestant is either going to win everything or lose everything." To Davies, a well-made game show offers the drama and spontaneity of sports.

The beauty of games is that they're also a low-risk business for the producers and the networks. Smush is a modest success at best for the USA Network and attracts an average of just 640,000 viewers, but it costs only $50,000 or so per half hour episode to produce. By keeping costs down Davies and USA both make out fine. Even Millionaire, which has lost nearly half its audience from its peak, remains solidly profitable for ABC. By contrast, one failed sitcom or drama can cost a studio and a network upwards of $10 million. That's one reason Sony Pictures Television, once a major supplier to the networks, stopped developing new dramas and sitcoms last fall but kept open its game-show unit, home to perennial money machines Jeopardy and Wheel of Fortune.

The hard part about making game shows is finding great ideas. Davies mostly leaves that to others. Millionaire was invented in Britain, where Davies frequently scouts formats. "I would love to be the self-appointed British ambassador for television in the U.S.," he says. Smush was created by Harry Gottlieb, who also designed the hit interactive game "You Don't Know Jack." The idea for Smush evolved from a Halloween party where people dressed as Peppermint Patty Hearst and Dances With Wolf Blitzer. It languished until Davies repackaged it and got several cable networks bidding for the rights. Says Gottlieb: "Michael is as fascinated by the political process of developing a television show as he is by the creative." It's no accident that Davies' company is called Diplomatic.

A brilliant student of TV, Davies is brimming with plans. He'd like to do a game-show version of Battle of the Network Stars and make live prime-time TV, and he dreams of a time when viewers will pay to play games from home. If even half of his ideas work out, you know where he'll be: on MichaelDavieseyStreet.