 This is the SF Productions Podcast Network. We're going to ask you to enter the Soundproof Isolation Boot. From the Pop Culture Bunker, I'm Mindy. And I'm Mark. You can check out our audio podcast, How I Got My Wife to Read Comics, on your favorite podcast catcher, or our website SFPodcastNetwork.com. Even before the pandemic ravaged the television schedule, a mostly dormant, or at least in prime time, format was making a comeback. The Game Show! Old favorites like Match Game, Pressure Lock, and To Tell the Truth were getting a new life, while new shows like Beat Shazam, essentially named that tune, and Mental Samurai began popping up. Why? Because they're cheap, despite the huge amount of cash you can, but are unlikely to win. But there was a time where Game Shows ruled the prime time roost, and almost brought an end to broadcast TV as we know it. Early Game Shows were cheap, both in production value and prizes to be won. The sponsor might hand out a fridge or a TV from their line of products. Keep in mind that, until the late 50s, partially due to what we're going to discuss, most TV shows were produced by an ad agency on behalf of their client's sponsor. There were also panel shows where a team of celebrities would guess something about a contestant. What's my line? I've got a secret like that. With the contestant winning $50 to $100 and a carton of Chesterfields, being on TV was the big prize. Another Game Show variant was the giveaway show, where people in the audience or at home via their phones could win a prize by answering a question. The FCC almost shut down the giveaway show in 1949, calling it an illegal lottery. It took the Supreme Court until 1954 to decide that wasn't the case, making big prizes totally legal. Meanwhile, networks and sponsors were looking for a new gimmick to kick up Game Show ratings. The Supreme Court decision may have inspired them to take this simple quiz show. Contestant answers trivia questions and crank it up to 11. In 1955, the $64,000 question premiered on CBS. There was an older game called the $64 question period, which gives you an idea of how small the prizes were to that point. A contestant would choose a category earning double the amount each time they got it right, rather similar to who wants to be a millionaire. The category was provided via an IBM sorting machine, although the producers later admitted all the cards that came out were identical. As the numbers went up, a contestant would only answer one question per week with other lower contestants filling up the rest of the show. Eventually, the contestant would be placed in a supposedly soundproof isolation booth to ramp up the excitement. This show was hugely popular, kicking out I Love Lucy from its number one ratings perch. It even generated a spinoff called the $64,000 challenge, with winning contestants pitted against each other. Winners became celebrities of a sort. Teddy Nadler won $252,000 on both shows. If that doesn't seem like celebrity money, consider that the average medium annual income was $3,600 that year. That $192k is equal to $2.4 million today. A female psychologist answered questions on boxing in one big and went on to appear on talk and game shows for years. Dr. Joyce Brothers. It also became a cultural touchstone with parodies on the Jack Benny program and the honeymooners. To say that television tends to jump on a trend as an understatement, and similar quiz shows sprouted up like weeds. Dotto, The Big Surprise, or Lover Money, Tic Tac Do, Top Dollar, The Big Pay Off, and 21. The top five TV shows in the ratings were quiz shows. However, 21 would prove to unravel the whole genre. The gimmick of NBC's 21 was that a contestant and their competitor would choose the difficulty of each question based on their familiarity of the subject. The goal was to reach 21 points with more difficult questions getting more points towards that goal. Missing a question lost to those points. Both contestants would be in isolation boots with headphones, only hearing their part of the game. So you didn't know how well your opponent was doing. When the show first went on the air, the initial contestants did poorly missing question after question. Sponsor Geritol, through the ad agency actually running the show, made it clear that this would not draw viewers and that something needed to be done. Suddenly, contestants did a lot better because they were given subjects they were experts on, although the audience didn't know that. When that proved to be insufficient, they were just given the answers, sometimes via practice rounds before the broadcasts, which just happened to be repeated on the show. The ad agency producers would also check the ratings and reviews of each show, see which contestants the audience liked, and give them a bit more assistance. Contestants were given lessons on how to answer questions, furring their brows, muttering, I know this one, and basingly stretching out each answer. The isolation boots were air conditioned, but could be shut off so they would literally sweat out the questions. Two contestants in particular stand out. Charles Van Doren and Herbert Stemple. The former was a movie star handsome college professor, the latter a bespectacled post office clerk with an incredible memory. Stemple was played up as the scrappy underdog to Van Doren, Stemple's wife actually came from a rich family, and they were well set financially, given an oversized suit by the producer. He was allegedly offered $25,000 on the side to play the part, which he did. Later, the producers would use this as leverage to get him to accept a lower final figure on what he actually won on the show. People began to tire of Stemple over time, and ratings dropped, so in came Van Doren, who quickly became a favorite, and the random category started leaning his way. After weeks and weeks of 2121 ties, the producers asked Stemple to take a dive and purposely miss questions. When he was asked to won the 1955 Best Picture Oscar, he guessed on the waterfront despite his love of the actual winner, Marty. One show later, Stemple was defeated and left the show, with a promise to get him a spot on a panel show unfulfilled. Meanwhile, Van Doren became a major celebrity, the cover of Time Magazine, a special correspondent on then-nason-to-the-day show, and a $150,000 three-year NBC contract. Stemple took his story to a TV columnist, but without any corroborating evidence, they shied away. It would take another show's mistake to supply that evidence. The standby contestant on CBS's Dotto, Edward Hilgemeier Jr., happened to find a notebook offstage from current contestant Marie Nguyen, which included both the questions and answers. She apparently needed to write them down to remember them. The offending pages were torn out and told competitor Yaffe Kimball after she lost to Marie Nguyen. The producers got wind of it and allegedly tried to pay them off. Hilgemeier went to sponsor Colgate Palmolive with the evidence and made its way to CBS. They checked the kinescope against the pages and then met with the show's creator, Frank Cooper, who admitted the show was fixed. CBS almost immediately canceled the primetime and daytime versions of 21, replacing it with top dollar. The change happened so swiftly that the studio audience who sat down to watch Dotto was informed as the show began that Dotto, the program that normally airs at this time, will no longer be seen. Instead, welcome to top dollar. Hilgemeier also took his evidence to the FCC, which is when the ugh hit the fan. The scam went public. There was a New York County grand jury. Most TV was still from New York at that time, which was an is-sealed followed by a congressional subcommittee on the matter. Stemple testified and after initially hiding out, so did Van Doren. Another 21 contestant, James Snodgrass, provided the final proof of that show's malfeasance. He documented each time he was coached and mailed himself registered letters about it. The congressional hearing was not just a chance to jump on the story for publicity reasons. There was real talk about whether broadcast networks were actually working in the public interest. Keep in mind that many national TV networks at the time were run by or strictly controlled by their governments. The U.S. was one of the few allowing private entities to run them. It would result in an amendment to the Communications Act of 1934, prohibiting the fixing of game shows as well as changes to the industry-run Code of Practices for Television Broadcasters. This also hastened the move of shows away from a single sponsor, becoming the multiple commercials we see and skip today, run by a TV or film studio rather than an ad agency. Van Doren lost his NBC deal and his professorship, ending up as an editor and writer. Stemple continued a career of a civil servant only accepting an interview decades later as part of the hype for 1994's Quiz Show film, highly recommended by the way. 21 producers Jack Berry and Dan Enright, the former with the show's host, were blacklisted for years. The quiz shows disappeared, replaced by the new trend, Westerns, as well as more public service programs, at least temporarily. The remaining game shows were given severe limits as to the amount of money they could give out, something that only opened up decades later, which brought us back to big bucks, as well as the number of contimes a contestant could play. Entire squads of monitors and attorneys were deployed to ensure games were on the up and up. This is also why there's a lot of fine print in the credits of game shows since then. And now game shows have returned to prime time. Can they avoid the temptation this time around? Who knows? While you're watching the game shows, you can also check out our audio podcast, How I Got My Wife Tree Comics, on your favorite podcast catcher on our website, sfpodcastnetwork.com. From the Pop Culture Bunker, I'm Mindy. And I'm Mark. Thanks for watching.