1950s quiz show scandals
That initial broadcast was, in the words of co-producer Dan Enright, "a dismal failure", as the two contestants were so lacking in the required knowledge that they answered a large number of the questions incorrectly.
[4] Three months into its run, Twenty-One featured a contestant, Herb Stempel, who had been coached by Enright to allow his opponent, Charles Van Doren, to win the game.
A year later, Stempel told the New York Journal-American's Jack O'Brian that his winning run as champion on the series had been choreographed to his advantage, and that the show's producer then ordered him to purposely lose his championship to Van Doren.
[4] Although contest-rigging was not a criminal offense, several producers and dozens of contestants chose, rather than publicly admit they were frauds, to perjure themselves before the grand jury by denying they participated in fixing the shows.
Enright was revealed to have rigged Twenty-One; Van Doren also eventually came forth with revelations about how he was persuaded to accept specific answers during his time on the show.
As a result of that action, many networks canceled their existing quiz shows and replaced them—at the prodding of incoming FCC commissioner Newton Minow[8]—with a higher number of public service programs.
While Stempel was in the midst of his winning streak, both of the $64,000 quiz shows (The $64,000 Question and its spin-off, The $64,000 Challenge) were in the top-ten rated programs but Twenty-One did not have the same popularity.
Enright, who produced both Tic-Tac-Dough and Twenty-One, saw his tryout and was familiar with his prestigious family background that included multiple Pulitzer Prize-winning authors and highly respected professors at Columbia.
[11] Another former contestant, James Snodgrass, made lists of all the questions and answers on which he was coached and mailed them to his own home in a series of registered letters before his games aired.
At the time Logue's lawsuit was filed, Steve Carlin, executive producer of Entertainment Productions, Inc., called her claim "ridiculous and hopeless".
[14] Charles Revson, head of Revlon and The Big Surprise's primary sponsor, asked the producers if Logue's accusation was true, and was told that it was not.
[15] In April 1957, Time magazine published an article detailing the depths to which producers managed game shows, just short of involving the contestants themselves.
Among them, with their last-aired dates, were: In late August 1958, New York prosecutor Joseph Stone convened a grand jury to investigate the allegations of the fixing of quiz shows.
[4] In October 1959, the House Subcommittee on Legislative Oversight, under Representative Oren Harris's chairmanship, began to hold hearings to investigate the scandal.
"[26] All of the regulations regarding television in the late 1950s were defined under the Communications Act of 1934, which dealt with the advertising, fair competition, and labeling of broadcast stations.
Because no specific laws existed regarding the fraudulent behavior in the quiz shows, whether the producers or contestants alike did anything illegal is debatable.
[11] After concluding the Harris Commission investigation, Congress amended the Communications Act to prohibit the fixing of televised contests of intellectual knowledge or skill.
Narz, who passed a lie-detector test at the time of the Dotto affair, had an extensive career as a game-show host after the incident (which also allowed him to help his brother, James, who later took on the name Tom Kennedy, break into the television business.)
Quiz-show scandals also justified and accelerated the growth of the networks' power over television advertisers concerning licensing, scheduling, and sponsorship of programs.
Quiz shows still held a stigma throughout much of the 1960s, which was eventually eased by the success of the lower-stakes and fully legitimate answer-and-question game Jeopardy!
[38] The biggest winner across the 11-year original NBC run of Jeopardy!, Burns Cameron, won only $11,100 in his playing career -- $7,070 in his five days and an additional $4,040 from his Tournament of Champions win, a full order of magnitude less than the 1950s quiz shows at their peak.
The other quiz show with a sustained run during the post-scandal era of the 1960s, one with the high-difficulty questions associated with the quiz show format, was GE College Bowl, in which college students competed on behalf of their universities (and the institutional goodwill those schools provided); competing teams were limited to five appearances and all winnings were placed in a scholarship trust.
Its revival of Tic-Tac-Dough would regularly produce "six to eight" winners each year who netted more than the networks' limits,[41] including one, Thom McKee, who would surpass Nadler's winnings with a total payday of $312,700 over a 46-episode run.
to both enormous critical success and high ratings, such of which still remains the last overall game show as of 2025 to become the most watched annual regular series overall on U.S. television.
