This Game is Rigged!

I've been enjoying rigged game shows this week. Quiz show questions, in a matter of moments, went from being essentially impossible to terribly simple and insipid after the quiz show scandals of the nineteen fifties. The most famous example of game show rigging was Twenty-One, which, to be fair, was not rigged by the show's producers but by its typically sinister sponsor, Geritol. They demanded the quiz show Twenty-One be rigged in order to make the show more captivating. Not only were contestants coached in their answers, they were also instructed which answers to get wrong, when to hum and haw, and when to wipe sweat from their brow. With this in mind, it makes the programs even more fascinating to watch - the contestants are all fairly convincing actors. Today, our friend the internet offers us two examples of rigged game shows from beginning to end:

Watch the phoney baloney Twenty-One.
Watch the equally fake 64,000 Challenge.

Comments

[giz]

there's actually a movie about the ethical dilema behind this show, called Game Show. Good film.

[King Daevid MacKenzie]

...the movie is actually titled QUIZ SHOW. There was also an installment of "American Experience" on PBS dealing with it. And game show host Jim Peck told me about how, as an employee of Barry-Enright Productions in the '80s, he learned to avoid even speaking the words "twenty" and "one" in the same sentence around Dan Enright (Jack Barry handled it better, probably because his face was on the damned show and Enright's never was)...