Television Quiz Shows
By RAYMOND A. SCHROTH
Catholic education suffered a
painful blow on Jan. 20.
Sitting in the hot seat on Who Wants to be a
Millionaire? was Brian, a young man in his 20s, who had fought his way
into the spotlight by quickly noting that Franklin D. Roosevelt had served
longer in the presidency than Ronald Reagan, John F. Kennedy and William Henry
Harrison. And he was from New Yorks Jesuit all-scholarship school, Regis
High School. Our minds raced ahead to tomorrows headlines: Jesuit
Education Makes Grad Rich!
And here comes the first question. Little Jack Horner reached into
his pie and pulled out what? Brians answer: blackbirds. Stunned silence.
The audience is dying to shout, Stuck in his thumb/ and pulled out a
plum. But it was all over. Sorry. Next contestant: Marty. Its his
wifes birthday. Complete this sentence: Alls fair in love and
______.
Until the TV quiz show scandals of 1955-56, it seemed that
these programs were one of the elevating forces in American cultural life. In
their panel show format -- like Whats My Line? -- still
running in late-night replays -- and radios Information
Please, we could watch or listen to witty celebrities trade pleasantries
and chuckle over their quips and goofs and feel good about ourselves if we were
occasionally almost as clever as they were.
In The $64,000 Question and Twenty- One,
darker forces were at work -- big money, at least by 50s standards -- but
there was also a moral lesson to be learned: Study hard and read a lot, like
Charles VanDoren, son of the famous Columbia professor Mark VanDoren, and you
might also strike it rich. Or, all that useless stuff you had to
memorize to get a liberal arts degree was not really useless after
all.
I can prove it from experience. In my senior year at Fordham I was
a member of Fordhams College Quiz Bowl team. When the buzzer
sounded, I was able to name the members of the Adams family. Today a contestant
would rattle off the characters in the TV comedy series based on Charles
Addams cartoon monsters.
The other Adams family consists of: John Adams, second president
of the United States; John Quincy Adams, also president, his son; his son,
Charles Francis Adams, ambassador to Great Britain during the Civil War; Henry
Adams, his son, author of Mont St. Michel and Chartres; and his
brother, Brooks Adams, a literary critic. I also had to sing the next two lines
of the song that began, I had a dream, dear. You had one, too.
Thanks to the other guys, who knew more than I did, we beat
Syracuse. We were awarded watches, and the dean took us to dinner at
Luchows, an old German restaurant on the Lower East Side that
doesnt exist any more.
Then suddenly the quiz shows came to symbolize something ugly
about us all.
The shows had been rigged, producers fed Van Doren the answers and
kept him winning for 15 weeks because viewers liked him and thought they could
identify with him. As a Columbia instructor he made $4,000 a year. As a
contestant he could make $100,000 in a few months.
His exposure, writes David Halberstam in The Fifties, was a
traumatic moment for the country. Starting with World War II ... America
had been on the right side: Its politicians and generals did not lie, and the
Americans had trusted what was written in their newspapers and, later,
broadcast over the airwaves. John Steinbeck wrote an angry article,
Have We Gone Soft? If I wanted to destroy a nation I would
give it too much and I would have it on its knees, miserable, greedy and sick.
... On all levels, American society is rigged, he wrote.
Now Twenty-One is back, plus Millionaire,
and one aptly named Greed. Their revival might tell us something
about ourselves or it might not.
Ben Stein, who has his own show, Win Ben Steins
Money, on the Comedy Network, said on the Lehrer News Hour
that these shows are simply replicating whats happening on the stock
market: America doesnt want to wait years or a generation to get
rich anymore. They see everybody else getting rich overnight.
Of course the belief in instant, unearned riches has always been
the dark side of the American Dream. Charles Foster (Citizen) Kane
was ruined by inherited wealth. State governments feed that dream with
lotteries and promised tax cuts. On a TV quiz show a combination of luck and a
headful of trivia can earn a million in 20 minutes.
Several critics have observed that the very easy questions,
especially when Millionaires are all multiple choice and you
have three chances to get help, represent the general TV-induced dumbing down
of America, more evidence that the school system has flopped. The old
Twenty-One made you name two people who rode with Paul Revere and
the man who lent him his horse. The new one asks whether Jerry Seinfeld lived
in the Bronx, Brooklyn or Manhattan.
On Millionaire you can get up to thousands of dollars
knowing a sombrero is a hat, Chock Full o Nuts is a coffee, Jupiter is
the biggest planet, Faulkner was from Mississippi, immigrants came to Ellis
Island, and J. Edgar Hoover ran the FBI.
But the easy questions are deceptive. Each list of 15 has one or
two so out of category that the generally educated competitor who is not a
media junkie is bound to stumble. Like Luke Skywalkers hometown or the
star whose part was edited out of The Big Chill. So many questions
have to do with movie and TV trivia that they imply the very act of watching
everything on television will make you both smart and rich at the same
time.
The other interesting criticism of Millionaire is the
looks of the contestants: They are overwhelmingly young white men. The
producers say they want to do something about this; but, given the rules,
its hard to see what they can do. Would-be contestants -- about 240,000 a
day -- call an 800 number in the evening, answer rapid-fire questions and
submit to a lottery. The system is wide open, but it favors people who are well
educated, assertive and quick. Two of these are personality traits independent
of intelligence. Today many more women than men go to college and get better
grades, but theyre not fighting to sit in the hot seat. Will
the quiz shows try affirmative action, easier, culturally
adapted questions for minorities, and actively recruit women?
Many of the rules, it seems, are geared to make the shows more
accessible, to keep us watching without feeling inferior. To allow
for our shrunken attention span, the tape is edited (an 18-second pause over a
question is cut to 4), and the pace is quick enough to run through five
contestants in one night. This also means that the new instant rich come and go
so quickly that their basic 15 minutes of fame fades fast. No one hangs around
for weeks inviting a nation of dreamers to read themselves into his story, to
share emotionally his rise and fall.
But are you ready for the Quiz? The questions test both secular
and religious literacy. I will send one crisp dollar bill to the first person
to mail NCR the correct answers to these three questions. If multiple
correct answers arrive in the same mail, lot will choose the winner. The dollar
is enough to pay for the post card and the stamp, but not enough to corrupt the
contestant. Of course the winners name will be published. If we
cant appeal to greed, we can at least tempt pride:
1. In what film does this memorable line appear?
Harry Faversham, what the devil are you doing here? (A)
Casablanca (B) Drums Along the Mohawk (C)
Four Feathers (D) Gunga Din
2. Ernest Renan,
Francois Mauriac, and Shusako Endo all wrote lives of: (A) St.
Francis (B) Jesus Christ (C) Joan of Arc (D) Thomas More
3.
Which Christian writer expressed the following profound thought? The rich
of this world will vanish like smoke, and their past joys will no longer be
remembered. (A) Thomas Aquinas (B) Thomas à Becket (C)
Thomas à Kempis (D) Thomas Merton
Send your final answers!
Entries must be postmarked by Feb. 15. Address them to Schroth
Quiz, c/o The National Catholic Reporter, 115 E. Armour Boulevard, Kansas City,
Mo. 64111.
Jesuit Fr. Raymond A. Schroth is NCRs media
critic.
National Catholic Reporter, February 11,
2000
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