American Scandal - Quiz Show Rigging | The Pressure Cooker | 5

Episode Date: April 15, 2025

Television producers Howard Blumenthal and Bob Boden weren’t old enough to experience the quiz show scandal of the 1950s firsthand, but it had a major impact on their lives and careers. Blumenthal’s father helped produce the rigged quiz show Twenty-One, and Boden worked alongside disgraced producer Dan Enright in the 1980s following his return to television. The two went on to co-found the National Archives of Game Show History and today, they join Lindsay to talk about the legacy of the quiz show scandal.Be the first to know about Wondery’s newest podcasts, curated recommendations, and more! Sign up now at https://wondery.fm/wonderynewsletterListen to American Scandal on the Wondery App or wherever you get your podcasts. Experience all episodes ad-free and be the first to binge the newest season. Unlock exclusive early access by joining Wondery+ in the Wondery App, Apple Podcasts or Spotify. Start your free trial today by visiting wondery.com/links/american-scandal/ now.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Hi, this is Lindsey Graham, host of American Scandal. Our back catalog has moved behind a paywall. Recent episodes remain free, but older ones will require a Wondery Plus subscription. With Wondery Plus, you get access to the full American Scandal archive, ad-free, plus early access to new seasons and more. Join Wondery Plus in the Wondery app or on Apple Podcasts. podcasts. When the quiz show 21 started airing on NBC in 1956, it was not rigged yet. But the ratings were so poor that the sponsor, Geritol, put host Jack Berry and producer Dan Enright on notice. Make it more exciting or else. Two years later, 21 was a hit, but it was also embroiled in a growing controversy over whether TV quiz shows,

which purported to show everyday people engaged in real contests of knowledge and skill, were actually all scripted and staged. 21 was not the only quiz show revealed to be at least partially rigged, but it became the most infamous, largely because it had the best-known champion in Charles Van Doren. Charming, articulate, and charismatic, Van Doren became a popular media figure in his own right, and then the face of a scandal that changed the way Americans watch television. One of my guests today is Howard Blumenthal, a long-time TV producer and co-founder of

the National Archives of Game Show history. His father, a TV producer himself, worked on 21, and when Dan Enright and other producers implicated in the scandal left the show, It fell to him to produce the final episode. Also joining me is the other co-founder of the National Archives of Game Show History, Bob Bowden. He's an executive producer of Funny You Should Ask, and between them, they've known, worked for or interviewed many people who were around during the rise and fall of the quiz shows of the 1950s.

Our conversation is next. Looking for the ultimate online casino experience? Step into the BedMGM Casino app, where every deal, spin and gold brings Las Vegas excitement into the palm of your hand. Take your seat at Premium Blackjack Pro, where strategy meets top tier gameplay. Drop in on the exciting Sugar Rush and Crazy Time slot games, or play the dazzling MGM Grand Emerald Nights, a slot experience that captures the magic of MGM.

With so many games, it's time to make your move. Download the app and visit BetMGM Ontario today to experience the next level of gaming. Visit betmgm.com for terms and conditions. 19 plus to wager. Ontario only. Please, gamble responsibly. If you have questions or concerns about your gambling or someone close to you, please contact Connex Ontario at 1-866-531-2600 to speak to an advisor free of charge.

BEDMGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with iGaming Ontario. When Luigi Mangione was arrested for allegedly shooting the CEO of United Healthcare, he didn't just spark outrage, he ignited a cultural firestorm. Is the system working, or is it time for a reckoning? I'm Jesse Weber. Listen to Law and Crime's Luigi exclusively on Wondery+. Howard Bluenthal and Bob Boden, welcome to American Scandal. Good to be here. Happy to do it.

So, Howard, let's start with you because your father was in the game show industry during this time. It's just after World War II. The new medium of television is ascending. How did your father get into the business in the first place? My dad was the kind of student in high school where he'd really rather be doing shows than he would be sitting in a classroom studying. So when he was in the Navy on a ship, he put on shows for thousands of people because as he said, Bob Hope knew nothing about our ship in the middle of the Pacific. So he would entertain and that's what he thought his career would be.

As it turned out, he was also a poor kid and he needed to start up some revenue in order to be able to feed him and his mom when he got back home. So he got a job at Esquire as an assistant art director and loved it. But of course, Rhodes are unpredictable. So after two years working as an art director, he's a little bored. Has lunch with a friend. The friend explains that Winky Dink and You, a children's series, is moving from Saturdays only to Saturday and Sunday mornings and they

need an art director, a second art director for the second day. So he was hired to do that but not really work on the show. He really worked on the merchandising. They were really pioneers in licensing and toy company relationships and the like, and he ran all of that. The company, Barry and Enright, was a company that also was doing game shows. And one of the shows was 21, which we'll talk about, but he worked on a bunch of other shows. And when Winky Dink went off, Dan Enright, who was sort of functionally the day-to-day operations guy, one of the partners, Dan didn't want to let him go, but didn't really have a job for him.

So he made up a job as an operations manager, which meant that basically Dad was kind of an associate producer on all of their prime time shows, daytime and nighttime. So he would wander into the studio and make sure everything was working as it should and making sure all the people and the pieces were there, the schedules were posted, that anybody who needed anything was serviced. So he would spend his day going from one studio or another interacting with stagehands, interacting with just all the physical aspects of doing a production. And that's how it started.

One of the shows was a series called Concentration, which he ended up later producing after the fallout of the quiz candles, because he had had the graphic artist's background and he was able to create puzzles and rebus puzzles and the like, visual puzzles. So it was a very natural sequence for him. And along the way, when he is in the studio, he's sort of very vaguely aware of some murmurs that there might be a problem. And we'll talk more about that. Yeah. Before we do though, Bob, let's explore where the quiz show format came from and

why did it become so popular? Well, quiz shows go back to radio and the birth of quiz shows really began in the 30s and the 40s on radio. Many of the quiz shows that appeared on radio later were adapted to television. So for instance there was a show on radio called Take It or Leave It, the $64 question, which later became the $64,000 question on television. So when television began in the late 40s, one of the obvious genres to program was game shows. They were cheap to produce, easy to mount, and appealed to a large sector of the audience, a lot easier to film than dramas and comedies.

So game shows were a natural, and as TV evolved, game shows became more and more popular. There were a wide variety of different types and styles of game shows. Many tested intellect, many were physical in nature because it was a visual medium.

So you could do stunts on a TV version of a game show, whereas you really couldn't succeed with that on radio. As the fifties wore on, people became more and more interested in wealth post-war. And so the quiz show started to give away larger and larger prizes. So the quiz show started to give away larger and larger prizes. That begat the era that led to the scandals. Now, Howard, you mentioned that Dan Enright wanted to keep your dad around even though he didn't have a real job for him. So he made up a position that I guess

turned into something quite permanent. But that gets me curious about Jack Berry and Dan Enright as bosses. What were they like as employers? Dan really ran the day-to-day production operation. Jack was really the host and he was hosting multiple series. So he was a very busy guy. So we had Winky Dink for about two years or so on Saturday mornings. And then in addition, there was...

Bob, what else did Jack host early on? He did Tic-Tac-Doh for a bit. I think he did the big surprise, but was replaced after a few weeks. And they were constantly developing new shows. So Jack was the sort of development engine in many ways for that. Dan was the production execution guy. So they had fairly distinct roles. When my dad would talk about working for Barry and Enright,

he really meant working for Dan. Dan was very difficult. He made my grownup, you know, it sounds funny, my grownup dad cry a few times, but Dan also bought my father our first TV. He just found it inconceivable that somebody working for him could not actually watch the shows. So one day a big box showed up at the apartment.

So there was a heart of gold part of it, but there was also a deeply uncomfortable aspect of working with Dan as well. And Bob, you've told stories that parallel some of that. Yeah, I can echo that sentiment 30 years later. I worked for Dan way later in the late eighties after Jack had passed away. There was probably no one more generous and sweeter than Dan, but he also had a dark side and if you upset him, it was hell to pay and the only thing worse than Dan's anger was Dan's apologies which often went on for days. I think

that he probably had some residue of PTSD from all that he went through after the scandals. Now of course 21 wasn't the only show embroiled in this scandal. It prompts a question whether this pressure cooker that Dan Enright created on set is due to him or due to the nature of a television game show. Well, let's separate daytime from prime time. On daytime, you have this strangeness of you've got a day-to-day monster that has to be fed. Monday through Friday, you got to have a show ready, you got to have five shows ready,

you have to have contestants ready. And the staffs are not anything like the size that they are now. So this is a small number of people carrying a pretty big load. In prime time, that's a bit of a different dynamic and a strange one in that most of the shows that we're going to talk about were actually produced in the same single studio 6A and NBC. It was much more of an event orientation, it was much more buzz. Bob, correct me if I'm wrong, tonight's show was across the hall. Yeah, they're in 6B. So there was just, it was sort of the energy center. And of course the sponsors and the network was spending a lot more time

worrying about what was on in primetime than there were what was going on in daytime. So the dynamics of all of this were very different. The stakes were very different. The size of the prizes was tremendously different. I mean, you know, on daytime you could walk out having won the game with a whole bunch of laundry detergent. But at nighttime, my father was talking about prizes including airplanes. So that's quite a difference. You mentioned that many of these shows were produced on the same studio,

presumably by oftentimes the same crew. Where did 21 fit into this game show scene? What was different about it? There was a distinct look to 21 that was dark and dramatic, which was unlike most other quiz shows. Even the $64,000 question was a lot brighter and a celebratory set, whereas 21 was decidedly dramatic in nature. Well, the crews moved from one studio to another throughout the day, so it's not

unreasonable to work on three different half-hour game shows. Stage managers would wander from one studio to the other depending upon what their little schedule sheet said. And for me, as a little kid, so now we're talking about the 1960s, I would go and look for Frank Caiden because Frank Caiden was this concentration stage manager, and any studio where Frank was doing the job, he would allow me to sit wherever I wanted.

So I'm probably eight years old. Everybody kind of knew one another's names. It was a very, very small operation. The large stick of 21 was the use of the soundproof booths. They up the drama, almost putting the contestants in a fishbowl of sorts. Where did this idea come from? Bob, wasn't that on 64?

Yeah. 64 had a single isolation booth. 21 was a competition between two players. That show had twin isolation booths, 21 was a competition between two players. So that show had twin isolation booths and the philosophy there was that player A could not hear what player B said and vice versa. So the concept of the isolation booth, I believe started on $64,000 of the question, but the reason for it really took hold on 21. And among my dad's list of things to do on days when 21 was live in the evening was to stand in the isolation booth, shining up, making sure the window was clear.

You know, he made sure he was wearing a headphone and tested everything with the audio crew and, you know, made sure it was secure for the audio booth in the control room as well as on the floor. So this was a process that they either took very seriously or pretended to take very seriously. Dan was a good producer. He recognized a good idea. He knew how to build drama. This was a device to do that.

And it wasn't very expensive and it looked really cool. So with all this built-in drama, it's curious then that 21 at first wasn't really that popular. What happened? Well, it wasn't a very good game. Let's start there. One of the essentials of having a game show is you need a good show and you need a good game. 21's very first episode in the control room was not a happy place.

Didn't work. I believe they got 17 questions wrong on the first episode. That was not what the network or the sponsor was hoping for. Let's talk about Geritol, the sponsor of 21. How much were the show's producers answerable to a sponsor like Geritol? Was dealing with a demanding sponsor something new for producers? Well, back up a little bit. The connection between sponsors and programming

was well established during radio. There were many, many examples of sponsors calling the shots. By the time we get to television, it's not as if that was a new idea. It was something that had been happening for decades. And the producer is doing their very best to deliver a good show. And you do run-throughs before you go to air.

You'd maybe do a pilot before you go to air. And you've practiced this a lot, but it doesn't always play out the way you thought it would. And I think that was the case for 21's situation. You talk yourself into, don't worry, it'll be fine in the studio. Somehow miracles will happen. And in the case of 21, the production gods were angry. They didn't favor the course. So the scoring problems that were inherent in the way the show was developed continued.

And we can see the performance that exists of Jack Barry kind of looking at all the zeros. Well you're not gonna answer that one either and we see that you know even now sometimes on Jeopardy where there'll be a couple of minutes where there's just nobody's answering anything but this was the show and there really wasn't any clear path out of this situation and the show was inherently flawed from the start. So what do you do? And it could be fix the lighting, it could be fix the set,

it could be fix the audio, it also could be fix the game. Well, if you're Jaritol, you say this never happens again and you make sure that Dan Enright is looking you directly in the eye when you say that and Dan says, I understand, I will do whatever it takes or something similar to that. And somehow miraculously, the next week, things were better. In the early hours of December 4th, 2024, CEO Brian Thompson stepped out onto the streets of Midtown Manhattan. This assailant starts firing at him. And the suspect...

He has been identified as Luigi Niccolas Mangione. ...became one of the most divisive figures in modern criminal history. I was meant to sow terror. He's awoking the people to a true issue. Listen to Law and Crime's Luigi exclusively on Wondery Plus. You can join Wondery Plus in the Wondery app, Spotify, or Apple podcasts. In the early hours of December 4, 2024,

CEO Brian Thompson stepped out onto the streets of Midtown Manhattan. This assailant pulls out a weapon and starts firing at him. We're talking about the CEO of the biggest private health insurance corporation in the world. And the suspect... He has been identified as Luigi Nicolas Mangione. ...became one of the most divisive figures

in modern criminal history. I was targeted, premeditated, and meant to sow terror. I'm Jesse Weber, host of Luigi, produced by Law & Crime and Twist. This is more than a true crime investigation we explore a uniquely American moment that could change the country forever. He's awoken the people to a true issue. I mean maybe this would lead rich and powerful people to

acknowledge the barbaric nature of our health care system. Listen to law and crimes Luigi exclusively on one degree plus enjoying in the Wondery app, Spotify or Apple podcasts. Now earlier, Bob, you said that one of the options for the producers is to fix the show, fix the game. One way to do that would be to repair the scoring system or alter the mechanics of the game. Probably less obvious is actually fixing the result of the game. How unusual would that decision be at this time in TV history? Wrestling was being aired on television

and it was probably certainly maybe fixed. I can't speak to whether the public knew or cared that wrestling was fixed, but I think there was a general perception that game shows were authentic, that the people who were on them legitimately earned the prizes that they won. So when the scandals came to light, it was this enormous betrayal of the American public. It was a dark day for television and a dark day for American culture on many levels, because the public had been duped.

They believed that the people who were smart on television were really smart. When they found out that the answers had been given to them, that was enormous shock. My guess is if a show got on the air like this that was half-baked, that it probably wasn't developed properly, that it wasn't given enough time to figure out where the flaws were. In the game show world in general, it's foolhardy to put a show even into a selling process until you've worked out the game and all the kinks and all the issues that might or might not come up.

And my hunch was with the frenzy that was just starting about Big Money Quiz shows that the show was underbaked and got on the air and there wasn't enough of an analysis to say, gee, this could really be boring if nobody answered the questions. So they found that out on the air and at that point, unless you scrap the whole thing and start all over again, you have to find other ways to put Band-Aids on some pretty big wounds. So that's when they decided the easiest thing to do was just make it work because it wasn't going to work organically. Well, I think they knew it was unethical, but I think the they in that sentence is a fairly limited group of people at the beginning. The

development of game shows at a fundamental level means you have to play the game a lot. You have to play the game with three contestants, then two, then in the second round, the points are doubled, no, they're tripled. You need to do that hundreds of times before it goes anywhere near a pitch meeting. You have to feel absolutely secure that the show works, but there are times when shows get rushed because there's a time slot, there's an immediate need by the sponsor, and everything accelerates and decisions that shouldn't be made get run over a little bit and maybe a little bit more.

And much of the time you've got skillful people and they're able to brush it over. In these cases, and remember it wasn't just 21 that wasn't the case, when you watch the episodes, the few that remain, the public was also duped pretty easily. It's fairly obvious that when Herb Stempel hems and haws before he doesn't or does answer a question. It's a little fake. Watching the shows today, it's a little hard to miss. Let's talk about one particular episode of 21, that of the night of September 9, 1958. In this episode, Jack Barry opens the show by denying all the rumors that the show is fixed.

Now, Bob, as part of the National Game Show archives, you conducted an interview with Jack Berry's widow, Patty, and Dan Enright's son, Don. What did Patty say about why her husband Jack did this in front of all of America? Why again, straight to their faces? Well, if there was one word that could describe the relationship between Jack Barry and Dan Enright through their entire lives, it was loyalty. Jack was loyal to Dan.

Dan was loyal to Jack, sometimes perhaps to a fault. And Dan had promised the contestants who were involved in this deception that it would never be revealed to the public. Patty spoke about how Jack's psychiatrist had warned him not to do this, that it would be a bad decision. Jack, to honor Dan's promise to those contestants, went on television that night and bold-faced lied to the American public and said there was no rigging going on. So Howard, whether or not the networks knew what was really going on with these quiz shows,

at some point the story gets out of course and media is printing accusations, rumors are flying around the industry. How in your opinion could the networks have handled things differently? Well, we talked about 1958. You really have to talk about 1956. This was not a new problem. The issues are festering and I strongly believe at least some of the people who were in the control room with Dan were aware. Now if you are a network executive and you smell a rat, your job is to say, hey, rat, and you may not do that publicly, but that's the job.

That's what you're supposed to do. That's what the American public is, you know, is relying upon you for. Okay, yes, the control was on Geritol's side. It's still your network, your credibility, your news division. All the things you do are based upon that fundamental public trust. And when that trust was breached, the network executives, and I'm sure this went all the way up to the top of the network, did nothing. They may have scolded, but mostly they looked away. So in my opinion, none of this ever should have happened because the situation should have been nipped in the bud, the first appearance,

the first sense, the show should have been taken off the air or handed off to another production company with strict instructions, but we knew the show didn't work, so the solution was really to take it off the air. It was wrong. Stempel knew it was wrong. In order to be able to keep things quiet, Stempel gets this soft sense of maybe I'll work for Dan Enright someday or something like that. So everybody had a little bit of nastiness in the game. And Van Doren, who had defeated Stempel, he knew it was wrong. He kept it quiet. He later admitted it was shamed irreparably wound up pretty much in hiding for the

better part of the rest of his life. And then came out in an article many years later and acknowledged the trauma that he had faced after having lied and been caught. It's hard to imagine in today's world how someone could keep a lie going that long and not have the wherewithal to say, wait a minute, this isn't cool. And yet these people were so caught up in the fame,

the money, the status that it brought them, they played the game. Herb Stempel signed a document in Dan Enright's presence, acknowledging that the shows were not fixed. Because he was playing a bigger game. He was hoping to become another kind of television star, another kind of celebrity. It's interesting to think about Herb Stempel had finished his run, but hung around the Baryon and Wright offices and that Dan would tell my dad to take her about to dinner. There was a friendly relationship.

Everybody was kind of sticking with the same side. My dad just didn't know anything about it. He just wasn't involved in any of that stuff. He was excluded. And the reason he told me, and I believe this is true, he's now passed, was because they felt concentration was going to end up saving their company and they needed dad around and clean to be able to continue with that show. And then that would lead to a few other shows on there as well.

So the idea was to go back into the daytime business and Dad was a piece of that puzzle. So he benefited in his way because he ended up as the producer of a game show that might not have happened were it not for the quiz scandals. I'm glad you brought your dad Norman back into the conversation because he produced the very last episode of 21. Share that story with us. Well, he thought they were crazy. Let's start there. He'd never produced a television show in his life.

And this show was a mess, right? So Norman knew all the crew people well. He was respected. It was easy. So the network executive, I think at that point, says, well, you're going to be producing the show tonight. He looked at the person and said, excuse me, and then he ran off to the bathroom real quick.

Came back and said, what do you need me to do exactly? They're like, you just need to be in charge of this episode. He's like, okay, I've seen other people do that. I guess I can do that. The crew and all that is like, we'll take care of you. Don't worry about it. So we'll carry you. Howard, did he know it was the last episode

or did he find out? No, everybody knew it was the last episode. Yeah, it was over. So he's like, well, I'm comfortable enough here. And they're like, don't worry, just sit down. It'll be over a half hour. But he hated the idea. He didn't want to do it at all.

But he truly was the last person standing. Everybody else was in some form of legal difficulty. So NBC could not afford to have any of those people produce. So the initial Enright strategy was actually a very good strategy, which is keep one person clean, at least, so that things can continue. And so after everything fell apart, what happened to Jack Berry and Dan Anwright?

The answer is everybody recovered to some extent. Jack and Dan were exiled. They could not find any work in the US. They went to Canada. Dan started up a number of productions in Canada and actually hired Jack to work with him up there. It wasn't until 1975, about 15 years after the scandal broke,

that they got back together. Three years prior to that, Jack had sold a show to CBS Daytime, The Joker's Wild. So they recovered. They ultimately, in an unusual twist, acquired the rights to Tic Tac Doe, which they had initially produced. And the show was bought by NBC during the scandal era.

And in the late 70s, Jack and Dan licensed it from NBC and produced a version that went on for eight years. And they were quite successful. Between the Jokers Wild and Tic Tac Doe and a few other shows, they rebuilt their company. They battled the embarrassment and the humiliation and were able to come back and be victorious. Every successful business starts with an idea and on the best idea yet, we're obsessed with those light bulb moments, like how a bored barista invented the Frappuccino during his downtime. And then it got acquired by Starbucks or how Patagonia's iconic fleece was inspired by a toilet seat cover.

On the best idea yet, we dive into the untold origin stories behind the products you're obsessed with, and the bold risk takers who made them go viral. These are the wild ideas and insights that made Birkenstock the best-selling sandals since Jesus. And made Super Mario the most played video game in the history of attention span. Nintendo almost became a ramen company until Super Mario saved it. New episodes drop every Tuesday. Follow the best idea yet on the Wondery app or wherever you get your podcasts.

You can listen early and ad-free right now by joining Wondery Plus. And if this podcast lasts longer than 45 minutes, call your doctor. In the early hours of December 4th, 2024, CEO Brian Thompson stepped out onto the streets of Midtown Manhattan. This assailant starts firing at him. And the suspect, he has been identified as Luigi Nicholas Mangione, became one of the most divisive figures in modern criminal history. It was meant to sow terror. He's awoking the people to a true issue. Listen to Law and Crime's Luigi exclusively on Wondery+. You can join Wondery Plus in the Wondery app, Spotify or Apple podcasts.

So, Bob, you work currently in the game show industry, and you kind of gave me a hint of this, but how do you think people in the industry now remember these quiz show scandals? I think many of the people who work in game shows today either have no concept of the scandal era or have heard of it peripherally, but it has no impact on their sense of integrity or honesty in their work. What came after the quiz show scandals was layer upon layer upon layer of legal enforcement after the Senate subcommittee hearings. It was determined that quiz show rigging was a federal offense and that anyone who participated in deceiving the viewing public in the context of

what was considered to be a legitimate quiz show would be subject to a significant fine and even time in federal prison Today there is FCC regulation for legal nerds out there. It's US Code Title 47, Chapter 5, Subchapter 5, Section 509, which states very clearly that there can be no unfairness or misrepresentation of the honesty of any type of competition on television. And that goes beyond quiz shows.

It goes into all game shows and today, all reality competition shows. Did these new rules put a damper on game show production? Well, as Howard said at the beginning of this interview, if it's a good game, there's nothing to worry about. Our job as producers and creative executives is to do our darnedest to make sure that the game is solid and doesn't need to be rigged.

If it needs to be rigged, then it shouldn't have gone on television. If you find that out too late, you have to pull it off television. But if the game is good, why would you try to create outcomes that are not legitimate? Game shows as an art form are happy places. They're places for celebration and excitement.

Yeah, a little bit of drama thrown in from time to time, but it's got to be real. The current trends of reality television and their popularity speak to the ability that the production community has gathered over the decades to create legitimate reality experiences that are honest and are represented properly to the American public. And those of us who toil in that world are very proud to be a part of it. Howard, you mentioned your dad, Norm, worked on a game show called Concentration after

the quiz show scandals. Tell us about that show. From post quiz scandal all the way through the early 70s, my dad produced one of the more popular daytime game shows called Concentration for NBC. And the show involved simply identifying individual puzzle pieces that would come together as a rebus. So you might have a letter followed by a bird. Then you'd have to figure out what that combination meant. And it required a game board that revealed little pieces of those puzzles. So you'd match items on a 30 square board and try to understand what the producer,

the creator, in that case, my dad, was trying to communicate. There was a time after the scandals when big money obviously was off the table, but didn't mean game shows were off the table. There were actually quite a few game shows on that emerged through the 50s and 60s, and a lot of them are now on in prime time, right? I want to tell a 30-second story about Jeopardy, because when Merv Griffin, who created Jeopardy with his then-wife, Julanne,

was thinking about how to recover from the quiz show scandals, this was the early 60s, and it was still fresh in everyone's mind. The story goes that they were on an airplane together, and Julian, his wife said, I've got an idea for a new quiz show. And he said, quiz show,

why would we do a quiz show? They all got in trouble. And she said, it's a quiz show where you give the people the answers and he stopped there and he said, wait a minute, that's how they got in trouble and she said, it's a quiz show where you give the people the answers. And he stopped there and he said, wait a minute, that's how they got in trouble. You can't give people the answer. She said, no, wait, wait, you give them the answers and the contestants have to come up with the questions.

And that was the birth of Jeopardy, which is on the air 60 years later and has never been tainted by the quiz show scandals. But at the time, it was an enormous risk for NBC, the network that had suffered the most arguably from the quiz show scandals to put a quiz show on in daytime. Here we are six decades later and it's still a hit show. Howard, what do you think the legacy of the scandals are? Well, there's a movie and I suspect that more people know more and it's still a hit show. And Howard, what do you think the legacy of the scandals are?

Well, there's a movie, and I suspect that more people know more about the Quiz Show scandals from the Robert Redford film, which certainly has its good parts and bad, truth or not. It's just too long ago. Even with all of my father's first person telling, it's still a little abstract, so you have that. But in some phases of our lives in the United States, we hold one another to a higher standard.

We have expectations, but things can go very wrong very quickly. And even the quiz show movie was 30 years ago. So if you have anybody working in the game show business today who's under 40, chances are even that movie is not on their radar. So I think the public needs to know about the quiz show scandal just to appreciate that what they're seeing today is legit, is real, is authentic, and that the entertainment value doesn't come from deception, it comes from quality. Howard Blumenthal, Bob Bowden, thank you both so much for talking with me on American Scandal.

Thanks for playing, Lindsay. It was really fun. Yes, thank you, Lindsay. That was my conversation with longtime TV producers Howard Blumenthal and Bob Bowden. Together, they co-founded the National Archives of Game Show History at the Strong Museum of Play in Rochester, New York. Bob is the executive producer of Funny You Should Ask. From Wondery, this is episode five of our series on Quiz Show Rigging, next on American Skin.

We're airing an encore presentation of our series on Edward Snowden, a whistleblower who changed the national conversation about privacy on the internet. As a contractor for the NSA, Snowden came to understand a devastating secret. The American government was conducting mass surveillance on its own citizens. If you're enjoying American Scandal, you can unlock exclusive seasons on Wondery Plus. Binge new seasons first and listen completely ad-free when you join Wondry Plus in the Wondry app, Apple Podcasts or Spotify. And before you go, tell us about yourself by filling out a survey at Wondry.com slash survey.

American Scandal is hosted, edited and executive produced by me, Lindsay Gramford, airship. Marshall Louie, and Aaron O'Flaherty for Wondering. Wondering. Jack, our show is called The Best One Yet, but can you introduce it as a Tinder bio? Yeah, this is Jack. That was Nick. We're best friends and ex-finance guys who host The Best One Yet, the daily podcast merging business news with pop culture. Yep. And we have a puppy. post the best one yet, the daily podcast merging business news with pop culture. And we have a puppy.

Actually, on our podcast, we'll tell you how Starbucks borrowed a growth hack from a ludicrous. Or that blondes showing their natural brunette hair is an early indicator of a recession. Or why, hot take coming, Apple's next product should be an AI smart toilet. We worked on Wall Street, sold a media startup to a tech company, and have done 1,500 episodes of this daily show. So whether you're launching a business aiming for that promotion or just want to be the best person at brunch, start your morning with our three business stories in 20 minutes. And if you don't use one of our takeaways in your next job interview, we'll give you

that puppy. It's a write off. The most interesting people follow the best one yet on the Wondery app or wherever you get your podcasts. you that puppy.