Go behind the scenes at ‘Family Feud’ with Wichita’s Barber family
On Friday evening, the Barber family of Wichita will appear on the game show “Family Feud,” and the episode will be well worth watching.
How do I know?
Because I was there, in the audience in Atlanta, cheering the Barbers as they competed on “Family Feud,” one of TV’s highest-rated game shows, and I returned with lots of fun behind-the-scenes stories.
My connection to the Barber family— who will appear on an episode that airs at 5 p.m. Friday, Jan. 30, on Fox Kansas, KSAS Channel 24 — is the bubbly and magnetic Erin Emrich, who works as a medical assistant at Mid Kansas Pediatric Associates in Wichita. I met her 18 years ago, when my best friend — Eagle visuals editor Jaime Green — formed a Cajun and Zydeco band called The Mudbugs. Jaime plays the drums, while Erin plays the triangle, provides backup vocals and charms the audience with her on-stage charisma and flouncy, colorful stage costumes.
Erin’s grown niece, Julia Barber, had applied for her family to appear on “Family Feud,” a game show that has been hosted by comedian Steve Harvey since 2010. Early last year, they got a call notifying them that they’d been chosen to compete as a girl-power team that would be made up of Julia and her sister, Caroline Barber; the girls’ mother (Erin’s big sister) Jennifer Barber, a manager at Wichita’s Aspen Boutique; and Erin’s eldest sister, Kristin Streufert, who lives in Dallas.
The taping was to happen in late March at the Tyler Perry Studios in Atlanta, and the Barbers were encouraged to bring friends and family to cheer for them in the audience. Erin invited Jaime, me and our friend and Wichita Eagle colleague Carrie Rengers, who writes about business, to tag along.
I was intrigued, and not only because I was a “Family Feud” devotee back in the 1980s, when the show was hosted by Richard Dawson and it didn’t occur to anyone to be offended when he kissed most of the female contestants on the lips. Not only that, but I also love Tyler Perry and had visions of running into him at the taping.
We booked rooms at the hotel where “Family Feud” was putting up the Barber family, and on March 26, we flew to Atlanta. I’d been to a game show taping once before: Back in 2002, my now ex-husband, Nick, was chosen to compete on “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire” in New York City. (I was shown cheering Nick on in the audience, and when host Meredith Vieira asked him what he’d do with the money if he won, he famously said he’d pay for me to take cooking classes. BECAUSE I LOVED TO COOK. Of course, Meredith and the rest of the audience assumed that he meant that my newlywed cooking needed some help and had a good laugh at my expense. But we digress.)
The setup for “Family Feud” tapings was similar to “Millionaire’s” in that contestants and audience members were warned that there was no guarantee when (or even if) contestants would film their respective episodes. Everyone was instructed to just show up and be prepared to wait.
We were warned that we’d need to bring our own lunches as the studios had no food, no vending machines and no way to accept deliveries. Since we were out-of-towners without a rental car and the hotel was in a remote area near the airport, that meant our only choice was to pack up leftovers from the hotel breakfast buffet. For two very long days, one of which stretched through both the lunch and dinner hours, we subsisted on apples, oranges, hard-boiled eggs and bagels schmeared with peanut butter from pre-packaged tubs.
From the shuttle bus, we were ushered into a cavernous room filled with rows of folding chairs. We were instructed to sit and wait to be called for our turn in the studio. Staffers tried to entertain us now and then, and a rather raucous line dance broke out at one point. But otherwise, we did a lot of sitting.
Things got much more interesting once we were actually in the studio, and that’s mostly because of Harvey. I knew of him, and of course, I knew about his famous 2015 Miss Universe flub, when he named the wrong person as winner of the pageant. But otherwise, I wasn’t that familiar with his work.
During the tapings, though, it quickly became apparent why Harvey is a rich and famous comedian. He was so . . . funny. So irreverent. He came out for each taping in a different designer suit, each a different vibrant color. And he immediately had the audience in the palm of hand. We ended up sitting through two full days of taping — probably five shows worth — but most of that time was spent laughing at Harvey’s hilarity. Even though each completed episode is only 30 minutes long, the tapings take three times as long because of all the Harvey hijinks that are eventually cut out.
In fact, “Family Feud” tapings are almost more like Steve Harvey standup shows. There’s a line drawn on the floor at the front of the stage, and Harvey tells the audience that when he crosses that line, everything he says is off limits for inclusion in the show. And he crosses that line. A lot.
He’s especially funny when feigning frustration with the contestants. His shtick is talking to the audience confidentially about the insanity of the contestants (and the contestants can’t really hear him because of the way the speakers are situated), and he’ll frequently sidetrack into a joke or an absurd, R-rated story. Several times during the two days we were in the studio, we laughed so hard that we cried, our sides hurt, and we felt exhausted when we finally regained our composure.
I’m not supposed to tell you how the Barber family did on the show. You’ll have to tune in to find out. But I must insist that you tune in. I don’t know if it will make the show, but Harvey was rather taken with Erin, as most people are. During their time on camera (which didn’t happen until the end of Day 2), he asked Erin to share the story about how she met her husband, Jeremiah, and became mock exasperated by the thoroughness of her tale. At one point, Harvey became so flummoxed that he threw his cue cards in the air and walked wordlessly off the stage as the audience wailed.
During our visit, we also were able to get to know some of the other families competing on the show, as we were all staying in the same hotel. And during the evenings, when the Barber girls were all too tired or nervous to socialize, Jaime, Carrie and I were able to Uber to some great Atlanta restaurants.
Now, nearly a year later, I remember that “Family Feud” trip as one of the most fun things I did in 2025, though we all walked away wanting to share specific ideas with Tyler Perry for improving the fan experience. (Audience members also had to stand in long lines for both the limited indoor toilets and for the glam portable toilets outside, and I’ve already decided that my back-up career should be running a hot dog cart at Tyler Perry studios that caters to starving “Family Feud” audience members.)
All of us from the Atlanta crew will gather for a watch party on Friday with the Barber girls, where we’ll no doubt reminisce about the highlights of the trip — and there were many — as well as about the lowlights: behind-the-scenes drama (the Barber girls trying to agree on which color-coded outfits to wear) and our pain and suffering (all that forced clapping left our hands a little sore, and without access to a vending machine, Carrie got so parched that she had to con a stagehand into bringing her a can of Coke.)
Also, I never did see Tyler Perry.
But we all left Atlanta with a lot of knowledge about how game shows work, and a lot of great memories.
The Barber family may or may not have left Atlanta with something more. I’m not at liberty to say.
Wichita’s Barber family on “Family Feud”
When: Their episode will air at 5 p.m. Friday, Jan. 30
Where: See it on KSAS, Fox Kansas, channel 24
This story was originally published January 29, 2026 at 5:06 AM.
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