If This Is the Answer, What’s the Question?

And that’s your final answer?

--host Regis Philbin to contestant on

ABC’s “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire”

You’re another victim of greed!

--host Chuck Woolery to contestant on Fox’s “Greed: The Multi-Million

Dollar Challenge”

First question: Are you an objective observer of quiz shows?

Cue tingly music as I grimace and wipe the perspiration from my brow.

My answer: No. About 25 years ago, I won a year’s supply of car wax impersonating a doctor (which elated my mother) as contestant No. 3 on “To Tell the Truth.”

Talk about nerves and stress. Not over all that great wax being at stake. I knew that my employer, the Louisville Times, was too ethical to allow me to keep it. And in any case, the magnificent clunker I was driving at the time was polish-proof.

My worry instead was about being exposed as a fraud on national television. I was drawing, naturally, on the humiliation of being regularly unmasked as a phony while writing a newspaper column.

These memories of contestant-hood surfaced as I watched last week’s two-hour premiere of “Greed: The Multi-Million Dollar Challenge” on Fox and this week’s resumption of “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire” on ABC, their deployment in this ratings sweeps month affirming just how much television is a carousel of recurring program ideas that go round and round. For all we know, coming next is the decade of the dusty western.

Back again this time: Quiz shows, many offering gaudy fortunes reminiscent of the mid-1950s when the likes of live, New York-based “Twenty-One,” “The $64,000 Question” and “The $64,000 Challenge” were among the most popular, most suspenseful shows on television.

And ultimately the most scandalous when it was revealed that they and other quiz shows were largely rigged, dropping them and the most famous of the disgraced big winners, Charles Van Doren of “Twenty-One,” out of sight.

TV’s latest exhuming of cadavers seems irrevocable for the moment given that “Greed” opened by giving struggling Fox its best Thursday night ratings in months, followed by Sunday night’s whopping 25.7 million audience for “Millionaire.”

That is encouraging to the industry multitudes committed to expanding this TV gameathon, for there are many more such shows in the works. They include NBC’s planned revival of “Twenty-One,” and CBS mulling the return of “The $64,000 Question” and “What’s My Line,” along with the creation of “Survivor,” a game-adventure series requiring contestants to compete for $1 million while left for a month on a deserted island near Borneo.

Going big in this area, too, is syndication and cable, where the Game Show Network is already operating and a diverse spate of new game shows will shortly join those in existence, such as Comedy Central’s “Win Ben Stein’s Money.” Which is preferable to winning Ben Stein.

More than a mere trend, this looks like an avalanche, one that Fox, if tradition is served, will tailor to its own gnarled personality. Surely on its drawing board: “Game Show Hosts That Kill!” and “When Good Game Show Contestants Go Bad!”

“Greed” is scheduled to air five more times. Although it’s hard imagining this level of desperation, about 10 million Americans watched its premiere, which smacked of TV for viewers who think the “millennium” was named after a recent Fox series. When not presiding over giveaways with the potential to reach $2 million, prefabricated, ad lib-challenged host Chuck Woolery (“Love Connection”) was stiffly explaining the game’s rules as if reading them from his fingernails and barking GREED! like a programmed android.

Speaking of that, “Greed” itself was hastily assembled in opportunistic response to surprise huge ratings earned by “Millionaire” in a two-week August trial that led to the latter’s present nightly gig running through Nov. 21.

Although Big Thinkers will relate this new quiz craze to something deep in the American psyche--like boredom--a sounder explanation may be extreme boredom.

Surely no one’s watching to increase IQ points.

In quiz show fashion, questions get harder as potential payoffs rise. Yet even George W. Bush could handle the several rounds of preliminary multiple choices that “Millionaire” host Regis Philbin throws at contestants as if asking them to explain Einstein’s Theory of Relativity in Latin.

Philbin: “According to a well-known proverb, what city was not built in a day?”

Cue low buzzing suspense music.

The contestant knew right away the answer wasn’t Sheboygan, and settled on Rome.

Philbin (stonily): “Sure about that?”

As sure as a Monday night contestant was that the Empire State Building wasn’t in Chicago, Tokyo or Fresno. Which left only the Big Apple.

Philbin (after pausing for effect): “That’s your final answer?”

You have the feeling that even in these early rounds contestants are urged to gab a lot to juice the suspense, as in the guy asked to pick where Chelsea Clinton went to college. Before answering correctly, he narrowed it to two schools and repeated them aloud, hoping for inspiration: “Berkeley, Stanford. Berkeley, Stanford. Berkeley, Stanford.”

Cut to Regis, who was feeling the contestant’s pain. Either that or thinking about starting off the next morning with Kathie Lee.

These theatrics are quaint compared to the vamping on some of the early quiz shows, where “Twenty-One” producer Dan Enright, for example, placed contestants in isolation booths and then turned off the air conditioning to make them sweat, coached them to anguish over every question, and used hyper music to ratchet up the melodrama. Even though the fix was in.

The question lingering from those days is why so many contestants who were fed answers--probably good, decent, honest folk in their personal lives back home--were so easily co-opted by quiz shows in a TV scam that required them to suspend those values on behalf of fame and profits.

The question about quiz shows today is why so many are watching.

* “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire” will be shown nightly on ABC at various times through Nov. 21.

* “Greed: The Multi-Million Dollar Challenge” will be shown on Fox at various times.

*

Howard Rosenberg’s column appears on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. He can be reached by e-mail at calendar.letters@latimes.com.