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

An Examination of television set Quiz rise Scandals of the 1950s wizard of the greatest captivators of public interest in the 1950s was the emerging test gimpy show on television system. The public, naively trustful, fell in get laid with television pole shows. People found them to be new, exciting, and similar to the enrapturing radio examine shows so popular before 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 alter in format from the basic question and answer type to the fitting of popular musical tunes. Public familiarity with the general structure of the quizzes, coupled with the strikingly high stakes, precipitated extreme interest in these shows, and led to the unbelievable popularity of roaring returning contestants (Anderson, 9). Virtually everyone with a television set in t heir legal residence tuned in weekly to their favorite game shows in the interest of perceive the contestants, with whom they identified much and more as the weeks went by, succeed 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 supposed 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).Quiz Show Telev ision Betrayals Past... and Present? Annenberg Washington Program. http//www.annenberg.nwu.edu/pubs/quiz/quiz.htm (3/11/97).Stone, J. and T. Yohn. Prime Time and Misdemeanors examine the 1950s TV Quiz Scandal -- A D.A.s Account. new-sprung(prenominal) 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 program for Power and Profit. New Jersey Prentice Hall, Inc., l971.