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Fed every answer in advance
Casting the champion
Twenty-One put two contestants in isolation booths, each answering trivia questions worth up to 11 points without knowing how the other was doing. Whoever got closest to 21 without going over won, which made it blackjack mixed with a general-knowledge quiz. Producer Dan Enright cast his contestants the way a studio casts a movie, as characters, and every movie needs a star.
Van Doren came from a famous family of authors, poets, critics, and professors, and he was a professor himself: good-looking, charismatic, and easy to like. His streak lifted him from Ivy League English lecturer to the covers of Time and TV Guide.
The fix
The producers had given him the answers ahead of time, like every other handpicked winner. When a champion had to lose to keep viewers hooked, they dictated how to throw the match and on which question. NBC didn't want to lose Van Doren, so when he was set to leave Twenty-One, the network made him the cultural correspondent for the Today show.
Earlier contestants who had agreed to lose looked at that soft landing and wondered where their own television jobs were. Most of the big-money quizzes of the late 1950s were fixed, and secrets don't hold among everyday people: for every contestant who is rigged, about five others learn what is happening behind the scenes.
The hearings
When Congress investigated, Van Doren sat at the center of the hearings. A letter from a woman who had watched him on Today, telling him he had to tell the truth in order to live with himself, tipped him into telling it. NBC fired him, and he had to leave his job at Columbia University.
Why did Congress outlaw rigged quiz shows?
When the scandal broke, no federal law covered fixing a quiz show. A House subcommittee held hearings in 1959, and Van Doren testified before it that November. In 1960, Congress amended the Communications Act to make secretly rigging a contest of knowledge, skill, or chance on the air a federal offense. That provision remains part of the Communications Act.
Why did sponsors care who won?
In the 1950s, a single company usually bought a whole program and put its name on it. Ratings decided whether that sponsor kept paying, so a champion viewers rooted for was worth real money. Twenty-One's sponsor was the maker of Geritol, an iron and vitamin tonic.
How did the scandal become a Hollywood film?
Richard Goodwin, a young congressional investigator on the case, wrote about the investigation in his 1988 memoir Remembering America. Director Robert Redford adapted that account into the 1994 film Quiz Show. It earned four Academy Award nominations, including Best Picture.
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