TELEVISION : ‘Quiz Show’: The Pattern Still Lives

Robert Redford’s “Quiz Show” is almost as entertaining as the fraudulent television it depicts. Like its subject, though, it doesn’t tell the entire truth.

The just-released movie spans the late 1950s, when scores of TV quiz shows were a diverting ritual and a catharsis for a nation experiencing its most severe recession since World War II.

TV’s big payoffs to ordinary citizens were a vicarious release at a time of ebbing prosperity, just as movies had brightened the gray lives of Americans in the 1930s during the Great Depression.

No wonder, then, that such live quiz shows were the soul of prime time during this period, with the likes of “Twenty-One” and “The $64,000 Question” zooming to such dizzying heights of popularity that one particularly edgy episode of the latter show attracted a whopping 84% of the households with TV sets.

The golden bubble exploded in 1958 with disclosures that some of the shows were rigged, and a year later the celebrated Charles Van Doren confessed that even he--the wavy-haired academic whose heroic run on “Twenty-One” made him a national poster boy--had been fed answers by the producers.

As for “Quiz Show,” how ironic that a movie so judgmental about the TV industry’s dishonesty in the 1950s should itself play loose with the truth for the sake of putting on a good show. Given its omissions and distortions, its moral tone is unbecoming.

Based on a section of Richard N. Goodwin’s book, “Remembering America,” the movie to a large extent narrows the widespread scandals to a personal duel between Van Doren and Goodwin, then a young attorney interrogating witnesses for the congressional subcommittee investigating the fixes. Although this “Columbo” device serves Paul Attanasio’s screenplay, it vastly overstates Goodwin’s role in the case and in exposing Van Doren.

Some dramatic license is unavoidable; you expect and accept it. Yet one could argue that Redford’s movie--in apparently making up some dialogue for the sake of drama (talks between Van Doren and his poet father, Mark Van Doren, for example)--is no less crooked than the TV hoaxers it portrays. How can one set of deceits be appropriate while another is not?

Nor does the movie’s laser focus on “Twenty-One” conspirators give a sense of how many quiz shows were on the air--from giant prime-time spectaculars to the likes of “Brains and Brawn,” “Music Bingo” and “Haggis Baggis”--so deep was their penetration into the American psyche and so widespread was the cheating.

“It’s marvelous how long it went on, considering the number of Americans who had to be corrupted to keep the camera whirring,” the New Yorker magazine wrote after the lid had blown off the scandals. “We are fascinated by the unimaginably tactful and delicate process whereby the housewife next door was transfigured into a paid cheat.”

Today’s prevailing wisdom is that the quiz scandals somehow robbed the nation of its innocence--a questionable thesis given that, only a few years later, Americans naively allowed their government to involve them in Vietnam, as if “Twenty-One” host Jack Barry and executive producer Dan Enright were in the Oval Office instead of John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson.

The more fascinating question--one unasked by “Quiz Show”--is why dozens of essentially decent, upstanding, ordinary Americans knowingly participated in these scams, presumably ignoring their values and allowing themselves to be co-opted.

Except for the relatively few participants who lied to a New York grand jury, no one broke any laws, making this a hoax without any real victims. Yet these people, from all across the country, were cheats, pretending to be something they weren’t. Did they do it purely for money? For fame? Or was it that television appeared so unreal to them that their own participation seemed benign?

Some viewers appeared to feel that way. In fact, some contestants were either ignored, belittled or reproached when they sought to blow the whistle on the shows. “Why in the hell did you wanna get up and blab your big mouth for?” Tennessean C.E. (Stoney) Jackson, a former clergyman, recalled being asked by a fellow townsperson after publicly confessing to getting help from the producers in winning $20,000 on “The $64,000 Question” and “The $64,000 Challenge.”

The question being asked today, even with legislation now forbidding such practices, is whether it could happen again. The answer? It is happening again.

Not on the few remaining quiz shows, but surely in other areas of television. That includes the built-in deceit of some daytime talk shows, whose theatrics make “Twenty-One” look like amateur night, and where spectacle is valued over honesty.

ABC’s “20/20” reported Friday, for example, that a “Ricki Lake” producer urged three guests to “ham it up” when telling a story about their “gay love triangle” (which they now say they concocted). According to one of the trio, the producer told him in advance to “play with the audience, but don’t do too much, and don’t forget to bring in scandal, and we want to make it look like . . . Mitch is jealous.” He claimed that the producer even fed him a titillating line to say in front of the camera.

And consider the case of Jerome Stanfield, whose claim of raping 90 prostitutes in a two-year period became a “Montel Williams” two-parter that was aired even though Stanfield had claimed after the taping that he was lying and police could find nothing to verify his rape-rampage story. Stanfield charged on “20/20” that the Williams show knew “from the start” that his story was a “fabrication.” The show denies the allegation.

Whatever the case, TV fibs in so many other ways: deceptive infomercials designed to resemble regular programs, faux network documentaries such as “The Incredible Discovery of Noah’s Ark” on CBS, local news programs that air promos that intentionally mislead or are presented as news stories.

The latest example of the latter came last Thursday when a KNBC-TV Channel 4 evening newscast gave several minutes to a “story” about “Extra” anchor Arthel Neville’s story about NBC’s “Frasier” and its star, Kelsey Grammer. A story about a story? It was the daily double, advertising both Channel 4’s new syndicated series “Extra” and one of its prime-time series under the guise of news.

So widespread are these practices that viewers have become desensitized to them, few appearing to care that the ethical vacuum in television today is every bit as large as it was during the quiz show scandals.

* COUNTERPUNCH

The son of the late producer of “Twenty-One” says Robert Redford is doing just what his father did. F3