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variety shows—game shows date from
radio. The three national broadcast net-
works—CBS, NBC, and ABC—were
originally radio networks, so those were
genres that programmers already knew.
Shows like “Jeopardy!” were as pop-
ular in the early years of television as
they are today. In the 1955-56 season, the
highest-rated show was “The $64,000
Question,” in which contestants won
money by answering questions in differ-
ent categories. Soon afterward, however,
a meteor struck the game-show planet
when it was discovered that Charles Van
Doren, a contestant on another quiz show,
“Twenty-One,” who had built up a huge
following and whose face had been on
the cover of Time, had been given the
answers in advance. It turned out that
most television quiz shows were rigged.
The news was received as a scandal; there
were congressional hearings, and the
Communications Act was amended to
make “secret assistance” to game-show
contestants a federal crime.
Whom did such “assistance” help?
Mostly, the networks. When a player is
on a streak, audience size increases, be-
cause more and more people tune in each
week to see if the streak will last. In the
nineteen-fifties, there were usually just
three shows to choose from in a given
time slot, so audiences were enormous.
As many as fifty-five million people—a
third of the population—tuned in to
“The $64,000 Question.” It was the equiv-
alent of broadcasting the Super Bowl
every week. The financial upside of a Van
Doren was huge.
But the scandal made it clear that
game shows are popular because they are
also reality television. “Jeopardy!” and
“The Apprentice” belong to the same
genre. So, for that matter, does TikTok.
The premise of reality television is that
the contestants are ordinary people, not
performers. This approach allows view-
ers to feel that they are matching wits
with the people on the screen, but there
is also something awe-inspiring about
watching Charles Van Doren, or Ken
Jennings, the owner of a six-month win-
ning streak on “Jeopardy!,” run up the
score. Still, you have to be able to believe
that these people are not professionals,
and that they are doing it without help.
In retrospect, the Van Doren fan-
demic seems odd. He held advanced de-
grees and taught at Columbia; he was
distinctly not the man on the street. It
helped that he was young and good-look-
ing, and that he really seemed to be sweat-
ing out the answers. One of the most
popular “Jeopardy!” winners, on the other
hand, is Frank Spangenberg, who for a
long time held the record for five-day
winnings ($102,597). Spangenberg was a
member of the New York City Transit
Police. He was the ideal game-show type,
someone viewers can relate to.
As Claire McNear explains in “An-
swers in the Form of Questions: A
Definitive History and Insider’s Guide
to ‘Jeopardy!’” (Twelve), a book mainly
for fans, the Van Doren scandal helped
define “Jeopardy!” in two respects. The
first is the concept for the show, which
is credited to Julann Griffin, Merv
Griffin’s wife. She is supposed to have
argued that, if it was a crime to give quiz-
show contestants the answers in advance,
then giving them the answers up front
and having them come up with the ques-
tions would get the show around the
Communications Act. This nonsensical
reasoning is repeated in virtually every
book on the show.
The other piece of long-term fallout
from the quiz-show scandals is that when
contestants on “Jeopardy!” return home,
and everyone asks them, “So what is Alex
Trebek really like?,” they have no answer.
This is because, except when the gameis in progress, the contestants never in-
teract with him. The policy is intended
to insure that no contestant is getting
off-camera help (which is also nonsen-
sical, since contestants could be getting
help from someone besides the host).
But the lack of face time with Trebek is
considered a major disappointment.
For Trebek was something between
a cult figure and an icon. “Our genera-
tion’s Cronkite,” Ken Jennings called him
in a column published last year, and the
comparison is apt. Walter Cronkite did
not report the news. He read cue cards
on the air every week night on CBS for
nineteen years. Trebek did not write the
clues on “Jeopardy!” He read them on
the morning of the taping, to make sure
he had the pronunciations right. His aura
of knowing the answers (or the ques-
tions) was, like Cronkite’s air of gravi-
tas, part of the onscreen persona. Cronkite
was trained as a journalist. He knew what
was going on in the world and he un-
derstood the events he reported on. But
that is not why he became an icon. Tre-
bek, too, was an educated man with gen-
uine curiosity and many interests. But it
would not have mattered if he wasn’t. By
some combination of familiarity and lon-
gevity, he and Cronkite acquired an out-
sized cultural status.
Like another TV icon, Johnny Car-
son, who hosted the “Tonight Show” for