Television Quiz Show Scandals of the 1950s Essay -- TV Game Shows

An Examination of Television quiz record Scandals of the fiftiesOne of the greatest captivators of popular interest in the 1950s was the emerging quiz game show on television. The public, naively trustful, brutal in love with television game shows. People found them to be new, exciting, and similar to the captivating radio quiz shows so popular originally televisions advent. Some game shows were developed primarily for laughs, while others were played for prizes or large sums of money. These game shows were so popular that at their peak, twenty-two of them were concurrently on the air. They varied in format from the basic question and arrange type to the naming of popular musical tunes. Public familiarity with the general social organisation of the quizzes, coup conduct with the strikingly high stakes, precipitated extreme interest in these shows, and led to the unbelievable popularity of successful returning contestants (Anderson, 9). Virtually everyone with a television c onform in their home tuned in weekly to their favorite game shows in the interest of testing the contestants, with whom they identified more and more as the weeks went by, keep an eye on in the quiz games. The popularity of quiz games was staggering. In August of 1955 approximately 32 million television sets and 47,560,000 viewers, almost one third of the nation, tuned in to see The $64,000 Question (Anderson, 8).By 1958, no one was laughing anymore. Grabbing the attention of the public even more than the shows themselves were the scandals which emerged around them. The publics naive trust had evolved into suspicious cynicism because it had learned that many of the shows were rigged. As can be imagined, this caused great disgust among viewers. The suppositional winners, for whom Americans had ro... ...rd University Press, 1994.Remarks made during quiz Show and the Future of Television. Annenberg Washington Program. http//www.annenberg.nwu.edu/pubs/quiz/remarks.htm (3/11/97).Qu iz Show Television Betrayals Past... and Present? Annenberg Washington Program. http//www.annenberg.nwu.edu/pubs/quiz/quiz.htm (3/11/97).Stone, J. and T. Yohn. heyday Time and Misdemeanors Investigating the 1950s TV Quiz Scandal -- A D.A.s Account. New Brunswick, New Jersey Rutgers University Press, 1992.Television in the 1950s. http//www.fiftiesweb.com/tv50.htm (3/11/97).Quiz Shows of the 1950s. http//www.fiftiesweb.com/quizshow.htm (7/10/97 added by PL)The Winning Answer. http//www.film.com/filma/reviews/quickrev.idc?REV=965 (3/11/97).Tuchman, Gaye. The TV Establishment Programming for Power and Profit. New Jersey Prentice Hall, Inc., l971.