Twenty One (game show)

Twenty One host Jack Barry (center), with contestants Vivienne Nearing and Charles Van Doren.

Twenty One is an American game show originally hosted by Jack Barry which aired on NBC from 1956 to 1958. Produced by Jack Barry-Dan Enright Productions, the program became notorious for being a rigged quiz show which nearly caused the demise of the entire genre in the wake of United States Senate investigations. The 1994 movie Quiz Show is based on these events. A new version aired in 2000 with Maury Povich hosting, lasting about four months, again on NBC.

Gameplay

Two contestants, typically a returning champion and a challenger, entered separate isolation booths and donned pairs of headphones. Due to the arrangement of the booths and the studio lighting, the contestants could not see or hear each other or the audience. At any given moment during the game, one booth would be "open," meaning that the occupant could hear the host in the headphones and be heard by him through the booth's microphone. The other booth would be "closed," with its microphone disabled and the headphones playing music so that the occupant could not hear the game.

The game was played in rounds, with Barry announcing the category for each round as it was dispensed from a machine on his podium; there were over 100 possible categories. The challenger played first in each round, with their booth open and the champion's closed, and selected the point value (1 to 11) they wanted to attempt. Higher-value questions were more difficult, and questions often had several parts. If the challenger answered correctly, the points were added to their score; a miss subtracted the points, but the score could never go below zero. The challenger's booth was then closed and the champion's opened so they could take a turn. Barry did not tell either contestant about the other's score or performance.

The goal was to earn a total of 21 points. If the challenger reached this score first, their booth was left open to hear the champion's turn, but they were cautioned not to speak or give away any information. Barry did not tell the champion that the challenger had already reached 21. If the champion failed to match that score, the challenger won. The champion won by reaching 21 first on their own turn. If a round ended in a 21–21 tie, the scores were erased and a new game was played. Contestants were given extra time to think on any question that would bring them up to 21.

After two rounds, both booths were opened and the contestants were given a chance to stop the game. If either of them asked to do so, the contestant in the lead was declared the winner. The game was automatically stopped after five rounds.

The winner of the game received $500 per point in the margin of victory (e.g. a 21–15 win paid $3,000). Whenever a game ended in a tie, the stakes were raised by $500 per point and a new game was played. If the champion won, they could choose to leave the show with all winnings intact or play again, basing this decision on a small amount of information about the next challenger. However, if the challenger won, their winnings for that game were paid out of the defeated champion's total.

2000 version

Questions were still worth 1 to 11 points, but all main-game questions were multiple-choice, with no "multiple-part" questions. Questions worth 6 or fewer points had one correct answer out of three choices. Questions worth 7 to 10 points had one correct answer out of four choices; for 10-point questions, "None of the above" was an option. Questions worth 11 points had two correct answers out of five, and both were required.

Incorrect answers no longer deducted points from a contestant's score. Instead, contestants earned a strike for each incorrect response; accumulating three strikes resulted in an automatic loss. This rule change meant that games could end without a winner, as the rounds again were played to completion. If one contestant had struck out on their turn and the second contestant had two strikes, they could also lose the game on an incorrect answer. However, a contestant did not know how their opponent had struck out unless explicitly told by the host.^[1]

Each contestant could call for a "Second Chance" once per game, allowing an opportunity to receive help from a friend or family member before answering. An incorrect response on a Second Chance penalized the contestant with two strikes instead of one. If the challenger struck out, and the champion had either one or two strikes and had not yet used their Second Chance, the round was played to completion since they could still strike out.

Games were still played to a maximum of five rounds, and beginning with the second episode, contestants had the option to stop the game after the second round if neither had reached 21. If time ran out during a game and at least two complete rounds had been played, the contestant in the lead was declared the winner and advanced to the Perfect 21 bonus round at the beginning of the next episode.

Unlike the 1950s version, if the game ended in a tie, no new game was played. Instead, the contestants would be asked one question, and the first contestant to ring-in got to answer. If right, he or she won the game and went on to play the bonus round; an incorrect answer gave the opponent a chance to respond. If both contestants missed the question, a new one was asked.

Payoff

Losing challengers received $1,000 as a consolation prize. Rather than receiving a dollar value multiplied by the point difference after winning each game, champions received progressively larger amounts for each opponent defeated. Originally, the payoff structure was as follows:

These amounts accumulated, so winning four games would be worth $1,000,000. After winning a fourth game, the contestant started the chain again at $100,000 for defeating a fifth opponent, $200,000 for defeating a sixth, and so on.

After a few early episodes, the prize ladder changed to the following:

These amounts accumulated, so winning seven games would be worth at least $2,675,000. As before, any contestant who defeated a seventh opponent started from the beginning of the chain.

When the rules changed, the returning champion had won one game and $100,000 in his appearance on the final show under the old prize structure. Instead of being "grandfathered" under the old prize structure, he played and won his second game for $250,000 (the next amount after $100,000), and played but lost his third game for $500,000.

Under both prize structures, champions remained on the show until being defeated, and new champions' winnings were not deducted from the totals of dethroned ones.

Contestant selection

During the first six episodes, the audience chose the winner's next opponent. The audience would be presented with two potential challengers to face the current champion, and the audience would vote for an opponent using keypads. The person who received the higher vote played against the champion; the other person would be one of the two potential challengers to be voted on for the next game. In the first episode, there were three potential opponents to face the champion. After the sixth episode, the process was changed to a random selection. At the beginning of the show, six potential challengers would be introduced, and would be selected randomly from that group for each new game. People who had not been selected by the end of the show were not guaranteed to return on the following show, although some people did appear on the show multiple times before being selected to play.

Bonus round: Perfect 21

The champion was asked a maximum of six true/false questions in a single category, starting at one point and increasing by one per question to a maximum value of six. After any correct answer, the champion could stop playing and receive $10,000 per point; an incorrect answer ended the round and forfeited this money. Correctly answering all six questions won the top prize of $210,000.

Big winners

Under the first payoff structure, Rahim Oberholtzer was the biggest winner, collecting $1,120,000 (at the time, the all-time game show winnings record) over four victories, three of which were due to his opponents striking out.

David Legler won $1,765,000 over six wins with the new payout structure. Legler was the top winner of American game shows until 2001 and is now the seventh-highest winner from an American television game show.

Broadcast history

Twenty One was originally conceived by host Jack Barry and producing partner Dan Enright as a weekly half-hour program for CBS' 1956–1957 schedule. The show was ultimately picked up by NBC, and ran from September 12, 1956 to October 17, 1958, under the sponsorship of Pharmaceuticals, Inc., the makers of Geritol. The series finished at #21 in the Nielsen ratings for the 1957–1958 season.^[2]

Jim Lange hosted a pilot for an abandoned syndicated revival of the show in 1982.

NBC revived the show in 2000 with Maury Povich as host, after ABC's Who Wants to Be a Millionaire, FOX's Greed, and CBS' Winning Lines proved big-money game shows had once again become viable prime-time network fare. NBC aired first-run episodes through the end of May sweeps, after which the network declined to renew the series. Several unaired episodes aired on PAX TV in the summer of 2000.

Scandal

The initial broadcast of Twenty One was played honestly, with no manipulation of the game by the producers. Unfortunately, that broadcast was, in the words of producer Dan Enright, "a dismal failure"; the first two contestants succeeded only in making a mockery of the format by showing how little they really knew. Show sponsor Geritol, upon seeing this opening-night performance, reportedly became furious with the results, and threatened to pull their sponsorship of the show if it happened again.

The end result: Twenty One was not merely "fixed", it was almost completely choreographed. Contestants were cast almost as if they were actors, and in fact were active and (usually) willing partners in the deception. They were given instruction as to how to dress, what to say to the host, when to say it, what questions to answer, what questions to miss, even when to mop their brows in their isolation booths (which had air conditioning that could be cut off at will, to make them sweat more).

Charles Van Doren

Charles Van Doren, a college professor, was introduced as a contestant on Twenty One on November 28, 1956, as a challenger to then-champion Herbert Stempel, a dominant contestant, though somewhat unpopular with viewers and eventually the sponsor. Van Doren and Stempel ultimately played to a series of four 21–21 games, with audience interest building with each passing week and each new game, until finally the clean-cut, "All American Boy" newcomer was able to outlast his bookish, quasi-intellectual opponent, who at one point after the game was referred to backstage as a "freak with a sponge memory". The film Quiz Show depicts the turning point as coming on a question directed to Stempel: "What film won the Academy Award for Best Picture in 1955?" Stempel legitimately knew the answer to that question was Marty, as it was one of his favorite films. The producers ordered him to answer the question with 1954's Best Picture winner, On the Waterfront.

Stempel later recalled that there was a moment in the booth when his conscience and sense of fair play warred with his sense of obligation and that he almost disrupted the scripted outcome by giving the correct answer. Stempel answered incorrectly as he was instructed, but redeemed himself by staying in the game and earning enough points to tie Van Doren's score, unlike the depiction of events in Quiz Show. Stempel was finally defeated in the next game, with Van Doren leading: the surviving kinescope of the broadcast shows Stempel failing to come up with the title of William Allen White's August 15, 1896, editorial in the Emporia Gazette, "What's the Matter with Kansas?" After the missed question, Van Doren quit with 18 points, which was enough to win. Van Doren's victory began one of the longest and most storied runs of any champion in the history of television game shows. Van Doren's popularity soared as a result of his success on Twenty One, earning him a place on the cover of Time magazine and even a regular feature spot on NBC's Today show; at one point, the program even surpassed CBS' I Love Lucy in the ratings. He was finally unseated as champion on March 11, 1957, by Vivienne Wax Nearing (1926–2007), after winning a total of $143,000.

In the meantime Stempel, disgruntled over being ordered to "take a dive", attempted to blow the whistle on what exactly was going on behind the scenes at Twenty One, even going so far as to have a federal investigator look into the show. Initially, little came of these investigations and Stempel's accusations were dismissed as jealousy because there was no hard evidence to back up his claims. While a congressional investigation did affect Twenty One during this period, the investigation in question was the HUAC hearings into possible Communists in entertainment; the show's director, Charles S. Dubin, was fired by NBC in June, 1958, after he refused to answer whether he ever had been part of the Communist party.^[3]

In August 1958 Dotto, a popular CBS daytime game show, was abruptly canceled after a contestant found a notebook containing the answers to every question that was to be asked to the show's current champion, future journalist Marie Winn. Suddenly, Stempel's allegations began to make more sense. Further eroding Barry and Enright's claims of honesty, another former contestant, James Snodgrass, came forward with corroborating proof the show was rigged: in a series of registered letters he had mailed to himself, Snodgrass documented each and every answer he was coached on prior to air time. ^[4]

But even with this new emerging evidence, the public at large didn't seem to want to accept the dishonesty until Van Doren, under oath before a House hearing, ultimately confessed to being given answers to all of his questions before each show.

Joseph Stone, the assistant New York district attorney who investigated the scandals, says in his book Prime Time and Misdemeanors that question writer Glorianne Rader was instructed by Dan Enright and associate producer Al Freedman, who had chosen the categories for the next broadcast earlier in the week, to place them in Barry's dispensing machine a few minutes before airtime; this was done to avoid any slipups in the planned outcome.

Twenty One was canceled without advance warning after its broadcast of October 17, 1958. A nighttime version of Concentration took over its time slot the following week. The scandal forced producers Barry and Enright into virtual exile. Barry would not host another national TV show for more than a decade, and Enright moved to Canada to continue his production career.

Aftermath

The scandal also caused the Federal Communications Commission to mandate the sale of Barry-Enright's radio station in Hollywood, Florida, WGMA. The station was purchased by its general manager, C. Edward Little, who promptly affiliated the station with the Mutual Broadcasting System. After serving for a time as the head of Mutual's affiliates association, Little became the president of Mutual from 1972–79. During this time Little created the Mutual Black Network, the first U.S. broadcast network catering exclusively to African-Americans, in addition to the Mutual Spanish Network and the Mutual Southwest Network. Under Little's administration, Mutual became the first commercial broadcasting entity to use satellite technology for program delivery. During his tenure as head of Mutual, Little hired Larry King to host an all-night phone-in talk show Little had created. King was a one-time announcer for Little at WGMA. King, who had previously hosted a similar morning show on Miami radio station WIOD, went on to national fame on both radio and television, winning a coveted Peabody Award along the way.

Jack Barry finally returned to game show hosting in 1969, succeeding Dennis Wholey on ABC's The Generation Gap for which he publicly thanked the producers and ABC-TV for giving him a chance for a comeback. In 1971, he sold ABC his first new game show The Reel Game which he also hosted. It ran for 13 weeks. He became a success again as a producer-host with The Joker's Wild, which ran on CBS from 1972–1975 and in syndication from 1977–1986 (Barry died in May 1984 and was replaced by Bill Cullen for the final two years). Enright would work as Joker's executive producer in the final year on CBS, and the two revived their partnership full-time in 1976, reviving Tic-Tac-Dough which also ran until 1986. It was revived once more in 1990, but was cancelled after a few months. Enright died in 1992.^[5]

2000

A second attempt actually made it to air when NBC, in the wake of the success of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire, revived the tainted quiz show on January 9, 2000. The new version was produced by Phil Gurin and Fred Silverman. The rules of this version, hosted by Maury Povich (and announced by John Cramer), were somewhat different from those of the 1950s version. It was taped at NBC Studios, stage 1 in Burbank, the longtime studio of The Tonight Show.

Licensed merchandise

A board game based on the original 1956–58 version was released by Lowell in 1957.

A paperback quiz book featuring 1–11 point questions in each of the 45 categories was released by Pyramid in 1958.

International versions

Twenty One is one of only three Barry–Enright game shows known to have foreign adaptations, the others being Tic-Tac-Dough and Concentration.

Country	Name	Host	Channel	Year Aired
Argentina	Veinte y Uno	Paola Krum	Telefe (ARG) Univision (USA)	Fall 2016
Australia	Big Nine	Athol Guy	Nine Network	1969–1970
Austria	Einundzwanzig	Rudolf Hornegg Elmar Gunsch	ORF	1958–74 late 1980s
	das Quiz 21	Karin Resetarits and Thomas Schuttken		1998
Brazil	Vinte e Um	Silvio Santos	SBT	2007
Canada (French)	Vingt-et-un	Guy Mongrain	TVA	September 2004 to May 2005
Germany	Haetten Sie's gewusst?	Hans (Heinz) Maegerlein	ARD	1958–69
	Quiz Einundzwanzig	Hans Meiser	RTL	2000–02
Mexico	Veinte y Uno	Andrea Legarreta	Televisa	July 2016
Poland	Dwadzieścia jeden	Rafał Rykowski	TVP1	2000–02
United Kingdom	Twenty-One	Chris Howland	ITV	July 3 – December 23, 1958
United States	Twenty One	Jack Barry 1956–1958 Monty Hall 1958	NBC	September 12, 1956 – October 16, 1958
		Maury Povich		January 9, 2000 – May 28, 2000

Episode status

Thirty-two episodes are held by the Library of Congress. The episode on which Van Doren defeated Stempel was released as part of a retail home video compilation featuring other episodes of game shows.

The 2000 version is intact and has been rerun on Game Show Network.

References

External links

• Twenty One (1956) at the Internet Movie Database (US version)
• Twenty One (2000) at the Internet Movie Database (US version)
• Big Nine (1969–1970) at the Internet Movie Database (Australian version)
• Hatten Sie's gewusst? (1958–1969) at the Internet Movie Database (German Version)
• Quiz Einundzwanzig (2000–2002) at the Internet Movie Database (German Version)
• Official site of the 2000 revival
• Official website for Vinte e um (Brazilian version)
• Vingt-et-un (in French)