Quiz-Show Scandal.

• Author: ENRADO, PATTY
• Position: 'Twenty-One' - Brief Article

Today's hit TV quiz shows have ancestors--with a dirty little secret

When parents told their kids to be like Charles Van Doren, they didn't mean be a phony.

In the winter of 1956-57, Van Doren, a handsome, learned Columbia University instructor, was the popular champion of a TV quiz show called Twenty-One. Name the Balearic Islands--and he did. List the members of George Washington's cabinet--and he did. For week after week, he nailed brain-busting questions like these, becoming a national hero, an all-star intellectual.

Except the whole show was a scam. And when the curtain was ripped off, the nation was so scandalized that quiz shows disappeared. Today, as prime-time quiz shows like Who Wants to Be a Millionaire flood the airwaves for the first time in decades, the nation has changed. In this era of professional wrestling, few Americans would be shocked to find out that a TV show was rigged. But the 1950s were different.

Television was still new. Just 10 percent of Americans owned sets at the start of the decade; by 1960, it was 90 percent. The TV industry made up the rules as it went along, creating brilliant live dramas--and quiz shows on which, supposedly, anything could happen.

The first of these shows, The $64,000 Question, made its debut on CBS in June 1955. It was exciting television, and advertisers pressured producers to keep it that way. Producers grilled contestants beforehand to determine their strong suits. If ratings were sagging with one winner, they could slip in a tough question outside those areas and be pretty sure of getting a new one. One producer recalls being told that the sponsor "thinks the Lincoln expert is boring. He wants you to stiff him."

Question's success spawned imitators, including Twenty-One, which first aired on NBC in September 1956. In this show, contestants had to answer questions from 108 categories. But no one was an expert in 108 fields. To keep viewers from being bored by constant I-don't-knows, producers started giving players the answers in advance.

When the young, clean-cut, intellectual Charles Van Doren appeared in producers' offices, they thought he would be a refreshing change from Twenty-One's reigning champ, a working-class ex-soldier named Herbert Stempel. It didn't hurt that Van Doren was from a famous literary family; his father, Mark Van Doren, was a noted poet. As Charles later recalled, a producer took him to his apartment and told him that

Stempel was unpopular, and was defeating...