Did you know that Jeopardy! is 55 years old and that it was born out of the wish for a game show that was honestly run and was still lucrative fun?
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Do you know why game shows failed in the late 50’s?
There were many game shows from the 1930 on to the ‘50s. And they were very popular. At forst they were strictly on the radio. Shows such as Information Please and Spelling Bee. were great hits. Then, as more households get TVs, shows such as This is the Missus and Queen For The Day began airing. They basically rewarded women with small items for doing silly contests or sharing sod stories. Nothing big or bad.
Then in 195, the Supreme Court ruled that show prizes ( giveaways) weren’t gambling. Now shows could offer prizes that were massive for those times.
The first popular high-stakes show, The $64,000 Question, created by CBS producer Louis Cowan and based on an older radio show, Take It or Leave It, paid the winners of a riveting general-knowledge quiz the equivalent of over $600,000 in modern dollars if they could beat out experts in their own fields. It was an immediate hit, and so were its most frequent winners. Soon another show, Twenty-One, reeled in NBC viewers by pitting two players against one another in a trivia game that involved isolation booths and headphones.
Suddenly, ordinary people who were frequent winners, were lifted above the crowd and became household names. Dr Joyce Brothers, a psychologist, was one such. She won the grand prize in The $64,000 Question . She actually crammed 20 encyclopedias on boxing before appearing on the show.
In 1956, on the show Twenty One, Charles Van Doren, a college professor and member of a famously intellectual family, eventually beat out the somewhat unpopular and nerdy ex-GI, Herb Stempel. Van Doren was handsome and well liked by fans. He won $104,500 on the series of shows.
Stempel was angry over his loss and told a reporter that the quiz show was rigged, but without proof, the story died before ever reaching print. However, in 1958 another contestant said he’d discovered materials that indicated the champion of the show had been given the answers to the questions on the show
It was the beginning of the end of quiz shows. Manhattan convened a grand jury that heard over 150 witnesses, but its conclusions were sealed and never made public. Congress investigated instead. When Twenty-One contestant James Snodgrass, who had also been given answers on the show, turned up with registered letters he had mailed to himself at the time of the show—each featuring the questions and answers he’d been given—the jig was up.
Van Doren admitted to lying and resigned his post at Columbia. He and 17 other contestants pleaded guilty to lying under oath to the grand jury in 1959. (They all received suspended sentences and sidestepped jail.) Though the grand jury estimated that two thirds of all witnesses committed perjury, many, like Brothers, continued to deny they had been involved in any rigging. In 1960, Congress put the final nail in the shows’ coffin by amending the Communications Act of 1934. Fixing quiz shows was now illegal.
That was the end of game shows.
BUT in 1963, Merv Griffin, lamenting that game shows were no longer on TV and talked to his wife, Julann. He mentioned that the public believed that contestants were given the answers to the questions. Her answer:
“Why don’t you give them the answers?” his wife, Julann, responded. Merv countered that the show wouldn’t have enough tension, so Julann countered that contestants could lose money if they asked the wrong questions. “That’ll put them in jeopardy,” she said—and a television legend was born.
Thanks to History for the information on game shows and the birth of Jeopardy!:
www.history.com/...