Those Old Good Games

By Paul Gray

A quiz show promising an astonishing payoff debuts on network television during the summer doldrums. The new prime-time entry attracts good ratings and earns a place on the fall schedule, at which point it becomes a national craze and TV's No. 1 hit. Competitors scramble to come up with big-money quiz shows of their own, offering richer pots and more intricate contest rules. The year is 1955.

The notorious scandals that followed so thoroughly rattled the fledgling medium of commercial television that 44 years would elapse before another summer upstart offering dazzling dollars in prime time would again galvanize the TV audience and spur a rash of imitations. The similarities between what is happening now and what happened during the '50s may not amount, in Yogi Berra's diagnosis, to a case of deja vu all over again, but those interested in looking ahead and guessing how the current quiz-show mania will play can find some suggestive clues by looking back.

The Millionaire of its era was The $64,000 Question, first broadcast by CBS on June 7, 1955. Producer Louis Cowan had dreamed up the idea and persuaded Revlon, without much difficulty, to sponsor it. The concept seemed promising: present ordinary Americans who happen to possess extraordinary expertise in a single field. Put these contestants through a series of questions that grow more difficult the more they win. After $4,000, contestants return each week to face a question that will double their money if they get it right. At $8,000, they are put in an isolation booth so that studio audiences won't distract or coach them.

No one foresaw how phenomenally successful this formula would be when it hit the small screens. Viewers in the '50s had not had time to become media savvy; at the start of the decade, less than 10% of U.S. households had a TV set, a figure that would swell to nearly 90% by 1960. Watching television, except in a few large cities, essentially meant choosing among the offerings of the three networks.

Thus, for 30 min. each week a massive audience witnessed, live, a parade of people trying to use their heads to strike it rich. Question quickly spawned a number of instant folk heros and heroines: the New York City cop who had brushed up his Shakespeare ($16,000); the shoemaker opera buff ($32,000); the young psychologist named Joyce Brothers whose specialty was prizefighting ($64,000).

Dr. Brothers, who went on to a notable TV career, attributes the appeal of the '50s quiz shows to lucky timing: "We were in a race with Russia to prove we were brighter, better, more intelligent," she says. "Today that's no big whoop." Robert Thompson, director of the Center for the Study of Popular Television at Syracuse University, agrees. "Back in the '50s, this was a rare instance where intellectualism and knowledge were really celebrated," he says. "Education had suddenly become a very, very front-page, desirable commodity. Bear in mind that these quiz shows are playing right about the time that Sputnik is being launched--and we can't get a rocket off the pad!"

The success of Question begat The $64,000 Challenge, in which those who had won $8,000 or more on Question could reappear. And then there was Twenty-One, which premiered on NBC Sept. 12, 1956. This program, chiefly the brainchild of producer Dan Enright, roughly adapted the rules of blackjack to a TV-quiz format: two contestants, two isolation booths, a series of questions worth from 1 to 11 points and drawn from 108 categories. Not only were these rules cutthroat; they were virtually impossible. No one would watch a show featuring two people being baffled by question after question. Faced with a choice between boring reality and exciting TV, Enright and his staff began coaching the contestants and scripting the results.

And that, as the nation would learn several years later, is how a young English instructor at Columbia University named Charles Van Doren defeated a C.C.N.Y. graduate student named Herb Stempel and became the reigning Twenty-One champion for 14 weeks, ultimately winning $129,000. Van Doren became so famous and popular that when he finally lost his title, NBC gave him a $50,000 annual contract and a spot on its Today show. For a while, at least, America fell in love with an egghead, until the country learned he had been coddled.

But trickeries of some sort existed on all the popular TV quizzes, not just Twenty-One. Myth has it that the accusations of rigging and the subsequent investigations drove the shows off the air. In truth, Question, Challenge and Twenty-One had all been canceled by the fall of 1958 because of plummeting ratings. When the full extent of the quiz-show tampering became clear during a 1959 congressional hearing, President Dwight Eisenhower called the deception "a terrible thing to do to the American public."

Which it was, but that public was bored well before it was disillusioned. That may be the most telling lesson of the '50s phenomenon. No one is going to rig the new crop of quiz shows; contestants already enjoy mostly laughable questions and plenty of outside, on-air help. The viewers will have to answer the only question that really matters: For how long?

--With reporting by William Tynan/New York

With reporting by William Tynan/New York