Word: quiz
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...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...
...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...
...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...
...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...