Twenty-One

This is the notorious show that got the quiz show scandals rolling. The episode I watched, (from the "Classic Television" DVD, available from PBS), does not contain the famous confrontation between Charles Van Doren and Herbert Stempel, (in which the unpopular Stempel was ordered to get an answer wrong and almost answered it right to screw the producers). Instead it's the second week of a confrontation between two other contestants, (I didn't write down their names), who redid a game because of a disputed answer.

They show the contestants sweating it out in the "isolation booths", (designed so that they didn't hear the answers of their rivals). Some of the questions were obtainable with knowledge of general history, (Who were the winning and losing generals at the battle of Saratoga?). Some of them, such as a list of members of the Continental Congress and what they did, seemed more esoteric, but that's because I didn't know the answers. The knowledge that contestants were being fed answers makes one squirm all the more as they search the far reaches of their minds for them. But it looks so much like similar moments in "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?" that you have to wonder what is going on now.

I should have been in bed at the age of 9 when Twenty-One came on. But I would try to listen on the stairs as this quiz show got all of America buzzing as to who would make 21 and win.

The show operated on the principles of blackjack. Instead of drawing cards you drew questions with a difficulty level from to 11. The first to reach 21 won the prize. If you drew number one the question might be something on the order of Who's buried in Grant's Tomb? But no one drew those.

Reportedly Jack Barry and Dan Enright tried to make it legitimate at first but the ratings almost sank the show. After that it was trying to get contestants like you would search today for a reality series.

The high water mark of the show and by this time there were any number of other quiz shows doing the same, some under the Barry-Enright banner, some not was when Charles Van Doren, the Columbia professor with the distinguished family name became the reigning champion defeating geeky Herbert Stempel from Queens. In his own way Stempel became the Howard Beale of quiz shows, eliminated for bad ratings.

But Herbie wouldn't stay down. He blew the lid and Van Doren who was something of an intellectual matinée idol was ruined. As the probe from Congress extended to the rest of quiz shows they went during the late Fifties in a massacre. The only ones left were the harmless parlor game type shows with small pay outs.

I remember Jack Barry was a good host who never let his own personality intrude into the contestants and their mission. Which was apparently to put on a good show rather than really show off their knowledge.

I remember to this day a line from the Ed Sullivan Show by I believe Alan King who said, "who would have thought the most honest thing on television was wrestling?"

In its heyday, Twenty-One was more than a game show. It was a cultural icon, a symbol of hope and inspiration for the millions who gathered around the TV to watch it. It thrust Professor Charles van Doren into the spotlight as a sort of intellectual Everyman, and he too became an icon of the values and morality of the 1950s.

Which made it all the more heartbreaking when it all came crashing down (as immortalized in Robert Redford's brilliant film 'Quiz Show'). The whole show was proven to be rigged and faked; the contestants frauds, van Doren included; the whole nation ended shocked and ultimately disappointed.

Twenty-One, which exists now mostly as a symbol, marked the demise of the era and the decline of morality.