It is truth that Quiz Show<\/em>, Robert Redford\u2019s 1994 film about a television scandal from the 1950s, is most obsessed with. It\u2019s laser-focused on the lies that TV feeds its audiences every night. Most of these lies are (or at least seem) harmless. But in revealing them, Redford suggests that there\u2019s something rotten at the medium\u2019s core.<\/p>\n The film focuses on Twenty-One<\/em>, one of the era\u2019s most popular quiz shows. The show\u2019s rules don\u2019t matter much. What does matter is who\u2019s in the soundproof boxes at the show\u2019s center, competing with one another to answer a variety of questions. More specifically, what matters is whether they connect with home audiences. That\u2019s the reason, the film suggests, that some contestants were given the answers to questions in advance.<\/p>\n When Quiz Show<\/em> starts, Herb Stempel (John Turturro) is being fed answers. Herb knows that he\u2019ll keep winning money as long as Geritol sales stay high. TV is held up by its advertisers, and because Geritol is the show\u2019s sole sponsor, its executive Martin Rittenhome (Martin Scorsese) has enormous sway.<\/p>\n Herb was good for Geritol. He had an \u201ceveryman appeal\u201d that kept him coming back week after week. He won money because those in power let him. And, when he fell out of favor, that was it. He was replaced by Charles Van Doren (Ralph Fiennes), a gentle, sophisticated man from a wealthy family. Played with charm and verve by Fiennes, Van Doren is corrupted before he ever appears on the show.<\/p>\n The man doing that corrupting is Dan Enright (David Paymer), the show\u2019s producer, and the film\u2019s most pivotal character. Enright is a corporate sleazeball. He\u2019s the one orchestrating the cheating, and he doesn\u2019t have many reservations about doing so.<\/p>\n He and his partner present the cheating as nothing more than an idea. They simply float it, making sure to casually explain that it\u2019s just another piece of fiction. After all, Eisenhower didn\u2019t really write his book. Nobody cares what\u2019s real. All audiences want is to be entertained.<\/p>\n When Quiz Show<\/em> came out, 25 years ago, cable news was already a force in modern American life \u2014 CNN was founded in 1980 \u2014 but Fox News didn\u2019t exist yet. Even so, Quiz Show<\/em> gets at something fundamental about that network\u2019s appeal. Both Twenty-One<\/em> and some of Fox\u2019s more controversial shows are entertainment that feel like the truth. On the network\u2019s opinion shows, there\u2019s often no distinction made between rampant speculation and fact, and viewers are left to decide what they believe. The truth can be entertaining, but when it isn\u2019t, it can be jettisoned in favor of a lie.<\/p>\n On Twenty-One<\/em>, Quiz Show<\/em> argues, the lies are part of the show\u2019s conception. That\u2019s why Quiz Show<\/em>\u2019s most searing indictment is not of producers who earn big ratings by lying to their audiences but of the untouchable men who know their TV shows are lying and just don\u2019t care.<\/p>\n Enright takes the fall for producing a show where he gave his contestants the answers. Dick Goodwin, the man investigating the show, doesn\u2019t care about Enright or Van Doren. \u201cI thought we were gonna get television,\u201d Goodwin says after Van Doren admits his deceit. He wanted to take down the system that allowed this to happen. Instead, Enright refused to condemn his superiors when pushed in front of a Congressional committee.<\/p>\n Enright knows that if he’s loyal, he\u2019ll be rehired. He\u2019ll have to go away for a while, but when he comes back, he\u2019ll have a job. The public has a very short memory, but corporations never forget.<\/p>\n The money men get off clean. They tell Congress they didn\u2019t know anything about the cheating, which we know is not the case. They have the money, though, so they\u2019re exonerated by their underlings. As Rittenhome points out, viewers didn\u2019t tune in to see how many questions they knew the answers to. \u201cThey just wanted to watch the money,\u201d he says. Audiences wanted to see how much money was won, and by whom. It\u2019s the American dream on live TV.<\/p>\n When Enright testifies before Congress, he makes himself out to be the Twenty-One<\/em> scandal\u2019s only true victim. After all, audiences were entertained, the sponsors and contestants made money, and the network got high ratings. No one got hurt.<\/p>\n Van Doren made more than $100,000, but the movie suggests that there was something fundamentally ruinous about the way he won it. He ends up without his teaching job, forced into a quiet life as an author. When he explains to Goodwin why he started cheating, he describes it as an unrefusable deal. He was offered $25,000 and notoriety to simply answer questions he already knew he knew.<\/p>\n \u201cAnyone who thinks money is just money couldn\u2019t have very much of it,\u201d Van Doren tells Goodwin. In Quiz Show<\/em>, money is status, fame, celebrity, and power. For Van Doren, it\u2019s a chance to prove his worth to his father. For Stempel, it\u2019s a chance to matter at all. For NBC and Geritol, it\u2019s the reason the lies were told in the first place.<\/p>\n Quiz Show<\/em> is outraged by the fact that the people behind these shows don\u2019t care what\u2019s on them, but why should they? Redford\u2019s indictment of television is that it\u2019s a business, and that means it\u2019s totally willing to corrupt itself for profit.<\/p>\n That corruption extends past NBC and Geritol, though. Every character in this story rots themselves out in search of a payday. Americans are expected to seize the opportunities they get, especially when they come with a compelling financial reward. Quiz Show<\/em> tells us what they lose along the way. That box in your living room is lying to you.<\/p>\n The final image of Quiz Show<\/em> plays over the closing credits. It\u2019s a vision of a crowd watching something we can\u2019t see and laughing at every second of it. In its final moments, Quiz Show<\/em> reminds us that we\u2019re all suckers too. We allowed TV to sell us something most of us will never be able to buy. Even worse, we enjoyed it. Quiz Show opens with a sale. Its first scene follows investigator Dick Goodwin (Rob Morrow) as he speaks with a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":528,"featured_media":12744,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1381,1399],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-12742","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-movies","category-looking-back"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12742","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/528"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12742"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12742\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/12744"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12742"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12742"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12742"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"\"](\"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/10\/quizshow2.jpg\")
<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n
\nJoin our mailing list<\/a>! Follow us on Twitter<\/a>! Write<\/a>\u00a0for us!<\/h6>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"