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Thursday, March 28, 2024

March 28, 2024: What is Game Show Studying?: Deal-Making

[On March 30, 1964, the legendary game show Jeopardy debuted. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy that classic and a handful of other game show histories! Add your thoughts, obviously in the form of a question, in comments!]

On AmericanStudies contexts for three generations of defining, deal-making game shows.

1)      The Price is Right (1956): There’s no way to talk about The Price is Right (the original version—starting in 1972 it was rebooted as The New Price is Right which remains on the air to this day) without connecting it to the late 1950s quiz show scandals about which I wrote on Tuesday. Partly because the stakes were significantly lower on Price than on those contemporary game shows, and partly (and relatedly) because the contestants seemed much more like ordinary people than the ostensibly super-smart quiz show contestants, Price not only survived the surge in cancellations that plagued the game show genre during and after those scandals, but really thrived as a contrast to those shows. To this day daytime game shows tend to feature more “everyday” contestants and tones compared to the heightened drama of prime-time shows, and that trend is closely tied to this prominent early example.

2)      Let’s Make a Deal (1963): The blossoming popularity of The Price is Right in the early 1960s was bound to produce competitors, and one of the first and most successful was Let’s Make a Deal. Deal was pretty similar to Price, and the two (in their respective rebooted forms) have really endured as the two most successful daytime game shows. But in my experience with them, I would say that (at least in its first 1960s iteration) Deal leaned even a bit more fully into a contestant pool that paralleled one of its principal intended audiences: traditional, stay-at-home housewives. Just look at the June Cleaver pearls on the first contestant in the 1963 debut episode hyperlinked above! Daytime TV has always been closely tied to images (and certainly also realities, but I would say even more images) of that community, and we can see them reflected in a daytime game show like this one.

3)      Deal or No Deal (2005): Deal or No Deal wasn’t the first primetime deal-making game show, but I would argue it was and remains one of the most popular, especially in its early years. Interestingly, a great deal of Deal (or No Deal) closely mimicked daytime shows like (Let’s Make a) Deal, as illustrated most succinctly by the bevy of attractive and seductively-dressed women supporting the male host. But while (Let’s Make a) Deal often featured one such female co-host at a time, Deal (or No Deal) featured twenty, and that was kind of the whole deal with this primetime show: very similar to the daytime ones, but with everything turned up to 11. Partly that’s just the difference between daytime and primetime TV, but I would say it also reflects the early 21st century’s increasing sense of the need for individual entertainment options to stand out amidst an ever-more-crowded cultural landscape. But one thing I know—as long as there are TVs, somewhere one will be showing a deal-making game show.

Last game show histories tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Other game shows you’d highlight?

Wednesday, March 27, 2024

March 27, 2024: What is Game Show Studying?: Dating Games

[On March 30, 1964, the legendary game show Jeopardy debuted. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy that classic and a handful of other game show histories! Add your thoughts, obviously in the form of a question, in comments!]

On a more straightforward and a more subtle context for a pair of groundbreaking game shows.

After the late 1950s quiz show scandals about which I wrote in yesterday’s post, TV game shows didn’t go away, nor did the genre leave quiz shows entirely behind, as the 1964 inspiration for this week’s series reflects (and on which I’ll have more to say in Friday’s post). But TV game shows did evolve significantly in the 1960s, and one of those evolutions was toward shows focused on dating and romance. 1965 saw the creation of one hugely popular such show, Chuck Barris’ The Dating Game (hosted by Jim Lange); a year later another was created, Nick Nicholson and E. Roger Muir’s The Newlywed Game (hosted by Bob Eubanks); and from then on these two shows were consistently connected, both in original episodes and in syndication (and even more fully in their 1990s joint revival, when the pair was known as “The Dating-Newlywed Hour”).

Pairing these two game shows offers a fascinating window into a period when social mores around romance were likewise evolving, as illustrated by The Dating Game’s relatively casual approach to the idea of an individual (and usually a single woman, although sometimes the genders of contestant and candidates were reversed) choosing potential romantic partners from a trio of anonymous single suitors. The Newlywed Game could thus be read as a more traditional counterpart, one focused on heterosexual couples who were already partnered up in that more conventional way (although the preponderance of Newlywed Game questions centered on what Eubanks called “making whoopee” was at least a bit controversial on 1960s TV). Since both shows remained on the air for many years, and then again were revived together in the 1990s, it would likewise be fascinating to consider how their individual and complementary depictions of romance themselves evolved as the shows went on (giving that one away as a Media Studies dissertation topic).

One of the complaints that’s been consistently directed at 21st century dating game shows (and with cause) is that the contestants are there not to find romance or love, but to become famous. The rise of the internet and social media and other such avenues to fame has no doubt changed the landscape of dating games, like all game shows (and all cultural forms period). But it’s also worth noting that these 1960s dating games likewise featured a number of both soon-to-be-famous and already-famous figures: The Dating Game in particular saw, to name just a handful, Farrah Fawcett, Tom Selleck, Andy Kaufman, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, and a very young Michael Freaking Jackson; The Newlywed Game did mostly feature non-famous couples in its earliest iterations, but would go on to include celebrity couples such as George Takei and his husband Brad Altman. Which is to say, it’s always been a fair question how much of these dating game shows has to do with dating and how much with games of very different, and very culturally telling varieties.

Next game show histories tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Other game shows you’d highlight?


Tuesday, March 26, 2024

March 26, 2024: What is Game Show Studying?: Quiz Show Scandals

[On March 30, 1964, the legendary game show Jeopardy debuted. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy that classic and a handful of other game show histories! Add your thoughts, obviously in the form of a question, in comments!]

On three ways to contextualize the fixing scandals that dominated the quiz and game show world in the late 1950s.

1)      Entertainment: As with many cultural forms, there are tensions and even contradictions present in the genre of the game show, and illustrated by that name itself: these are indeed games, with rules and results and winners and losers and so on; but they are also shows, designed to appeal to audiences (and needing to do so in order to stay on the air of course). It seems that one of the first and most prominent fixing scandals began as a direct result of that contradiction: the September 1956 debut episode of the NBC quiz show Twenty-One (hosted by Jack Barry) went quite poorly, as the two contestants got most of the questions wrong; the show’s main sponsor Geritol complained to the network and producer Dan Enright and demanded a change. Just a few months later Twenty-One featured an extended run of victories by Herb Stempel, the contestant who would later raise the first accusations of fixing (on his behalf, and then in favor of his successor as champion, Charles Van Doren).

2)      Law: If these scandals were thus very much about entertainment, the responses to them quickly and thoroughly became about something very different: the law. When a fixing scandal for a second game show, Dotto, emerged in August 1958 (as the Twenty-One scandal was also really breaking), the result was nothing short of a nine-month-long New York County grand jury investigation, in the course of which a number of producers and contestants apparently committed perjury rather than admit to their roles in the scandals. The grand jury did not ultimately hand down indictments, but the whole thing then escalated even further, to an August 1959 U.S. Congress subcommittee investigation. That did produce a significant and enduring legal change, a 1960 amending of the influential Communications Act of 1934 which make fixing game shows illegal.

3)      Identity: Quiz Show (1994), the Robert Redford-directed film which focuses on the Twenty-One scandal in particular, certainly engages with all these histories and themes. But I would argue that the film focuses even more on another context, a more ambiguous but also perhaps even more definingly American one: the role that identity and community played for individual figures like the Jewish underdog Stempel (played by John Turturro) and WASP son of privilege Van Doren (played by Ralph Fiennes). It isn’t always easy to remember that each and every game show contestant is a complicated human being, with all the baggage of heritage, family, community, psychology, and more that influence each of us. But Redford’s film asks us to keep that in mind, not just for these quiz show scandal figures but for everyone who takes part in the long and ongoing tradition of game shows.

Next game show histories tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Other game shows you’d highlight?

Monday, March 25, 2024

March 25, 2024: What is Game Show Studying?: 30s and 40s Origins

[On March 30, 1964, the legendary game show Jeopardy debuted. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy that classic and a handful of other game show histories! Add your thoughts, obviously in the form of a question, in comments!]

On three stages in the genre’s experimental early decades.

1)      1938 Starting Points: Of course quizzes and trivia questions and the like had been part of society in various forms for centuries, but the first official “game shows” on both radio and television appeared in the same month and year, May 1938: the American radio show Information Please (which debuted on May 17th and would run for the next 13 years); and the very early British TV show Spelling Bee (which debuted on May 31st and featured four live episodes). Both radio and TV have continued to feature quiz shows and game shows in prominent roles ever since, so this dual origin point isn’t surprising (although I’ll admit to not realizing prior to research this series that TV existed in any meaningful form in 1938). Of course one factor was the evolution of these media and technologies, but I would also argue that the Depression-era timing wasn’t a coincidence; audiences needed escapes from their difficult realities, and as the name suggests, game shows offered a fun such respite.

2)      1941 Evolutions: Spelling Bee was a bit of a one-off, and it was a few years later that TV game shows began to emerge and evolve more fully. That started with an adaptation of a popular radio show, Truth or Consequences, which had debuted on the radio in March 1940 but aired an experimental TV version on July 1, 1941 (making it the first game show on broadcast TV, although it would only become a regular TV program in 1950). Just one day later, on July 2, saw the debut of the first regularly scheduled TV game show, CBS Television Quiz, which aired weekly for about a year. Again this timing was at least a bit coincidental and likely reflective of TV’s evolutions and new possibilities in the period, but I would likewise connect these to their 1941 moment, and the need for an audience to be temporarily and enjoyably distracted from a world at war.

3)      You Bet Your Life: One of the most successful game shows of the 1940s appeared in both media, not just as an adaptation from one to the other but as a program that moved back and forth between the two. That was You Bet Your Life, the Groucho Marx-hosted comedy quiz show which debuted on the radio in 1947, on TV in 1950, and continued in both media (again in a back-and-forth kind of way) for another decade. You Bet Your Life was genuinely a quiz show, but a great deal of its marketing and appeal centered on its funny and famous host, making this in many ways the first game show that was more about personality and performance than the games or quizzes themselves. That would become a recurring element of the genre, exemplified of course by the legendary Jeopardy host about whom I’ll have more to say on Friday.

Next game show histories tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Other game shows you’d highlight?

Saturday, March 23, 2024

March 23-24, 2024: American Magic: Harry Houdini

[This weekend marks Harry Houdini’s 150th birthday! So this week on the blog I’ve performed some AmericanStudying magic of my own, leading up to this special post on that legendary prestidigitator.]

On three lesser-known layers to perhaps our most famous magician.

1)      An Immigrant Family: Born Erik Weisz in Budapest in 1874, Houdini was literally part of such a family, as he, his parents, and his six siblings immigrated to the United States in 1878 (part of that era’s sizeable wave of immigration from Eastern Europe among other places). But that family was also an influential part of Houdini’s development as a performer, including his debut as a 9 year old trapeze artist “Ehrich, the Prince of the Air” in entertainer Jack Hoeffler’s traveling circus; and his first true performances in the early 1890s, working alongside his brother Theodore (known as “Dash”) in an act called “The Brothers Houdini.” As I wrote about in one of my early posts, the late 19th century was the heyday of the concept of the “self-made man,” but it takes a village to produce any successful figure, and Harry Houdini was no more self-made than anyone else in that category.

2)      An Inspiring Partnership: There are likely various reasons why Houdini and Dash stopped performing together, including Houdini’s own developing turn of the 20th century fame as an individual artist (especially when he began transitioning from card magic to escapes), but one factor was a bit less of a fraternal bond: Dash had a romantic interest in a fellow performer, Wilhelmina Beatrice “Bess” Rahner; but Houdini was likewise interested, won her hand in marriage in 1894, and made her his stage assistant in a new act known as “The Houdinis.” Although that’s obviously a complicated story and one on which Dash would undoubtedly have a different perspective, it did lead to a lifelong partnership for Houdini on multiple levels, as Bess would remain both his wife and his performing partner for the rest of his life.

3)      An Irritable Author: Those performances would of course define the remaining three decades of Houdini’s career, from that 1894 marriage through his tragically early death in 1926 (officially from appendicitis, but apocryphally from a punch to the stomach). But another through-line in his career was Houdini’s use of writing not only to market himself but also and especially to express his grievances with fellow performers and the profession. When he founded a periodical, the Conjurers’ Monthly Magazine, in 1906, it only featured two editions before the preponderance of what magic historian Jim Steinmeyer calls Houdini’s “own crusades” led to its failure. Undeterred by that failure, in 1908 Houdini published a book, The Unmasking of Robert-Houdin, which attacked the French magician from whom Houdini had drawn his stage name as a fraud (due at least in part to Houdini feeling slighted by Robert-Houdin’s family during a European tour). Houdini could escape most anything, but clearly not the fraught chambers of his own psyche, no more than any of us can.

Next series starts Monday,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Magicians or magic histories or contexts you’d highlight?

Friday, March 22, 2024

March 22, 2024: American Magic: 21st Century Evolutions

[This coming weekend marks Harry Houdini’s 150th birthday! So this week on the blog I’ll perform some AmericanStudying magic of my own, leading up to a special post on that legendary prestidigitator.]

On a handful of contemporary talents who reflect how magic has continued to evolve.

1)      Ricky Jay: I honestly don’t want to say too much here, as I’d rather you take the next hour and watch that amazing special (directed by David Mamet!). The heart of magic shows are card tricks, and no one—not in our own era, and not ever as far as I’m concerned—has mastered them more than Ricky Jay did (he tragically passed away in 2018 at the age of 72). Watch that video if you doubt my claim!

2)      Lance Burton: Burton has been performing magic since 1981 and continues to do a Las Vegas show to this day, and as the images and details on that website indicate is very much in the vein of the classic stage magicians. The evolution of an art form doesn’t have to mean brand-new iterations, of course—it can also mean how the traditional versions have extended into our own moment, what it means to perform today in those longstanding ways. Burton seems to embody that form of magic, and has for many decades now.

3)      David Blaine: The next couple magicians I’ll highlight in this post do represent more dramatic evolutions and shifts in the art of magic, however. David Blaine does perform card tricks, but in a close-up, intimate, audience-involving style that differs quite strikingly from Ricky Jay’s more traditional stage show. And he does perform illusions, but in a more extreme and death-defying form than the likewise more traditional stage show of a performer like Lance Burton. For all those reasons, when I think magic for the internet age I think of David Blaine.

4)      Criss Angel: Criss Angel likewise made his reputation performing death-defying illusions and achieving viral internet fame, but I would say in comparison to Blaine that Angel has been consistently best-known for his series of television shows and specials. In that way, Angel extends but also evolves the way that TV has played a significant role in the career of yesterday’s subjects, Penn & Teller. One critique of Angel at times has been that his shows focus more on images and narrative storytelling than on the magic itself, but that’s the fine line of any televised entertainment, and a telling reflection of where and how Angel’s career developed.

5)      Fay Presto: For most of its history magic has been a male-dominated industry (other than those scantily-clad female assistants about whom I wrote early in the week), but of course that’s never been absolute, and it has likewise evolved here in the 21st century. English magician Fay Presto isn’t just an example of a successful and famous female performer, she’s one who has been voted The Magic Circle’s “Magician of the Year” on multiple occasions. She’s not alone as a prominent female magician, past and present, but it’s equally important not to limit her through that category, and instead to name her as another talented reflection of magic’s enduring presence here in the 21st century.

Houdini post this weekend,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Magicians or magic histories or contexts you’d highlight?

Thursday, March 21, 2024

March 21, 2024: American Magic: Penn & Teller

[This coming weekend marks Harry Houdini’s 150th birthday! So this week on the blog I’ll perform some AmericanStudying magic of my own, leading up to a special post on that legendary prestidigitator.]

On three telling influences on one of the most famous magic acts of the last half-century.

1)      Wier Chrisemer: That enjoyable 1989 Calvin Trillin New Yorker profile of the duo makes clear the debt that Penn Fraser Jillette & Raymond Joseph Teller owed to Wier Chrisemer, a friend of Teller’s from his undergraduate days at Amherst College whose scholarly and professional interest in music was their first entrée into the world of performance and whose talents as an amateur magician led the three men to form a trio known as “The Asparagus Valley Cultural Society.” A couple months back I wrote in this post about how The Three Stooges were originally part of a comedy troupe led by Ted Healy, but ended up achieving their lasting fame without him; similarly, it was after Chrisemer retired from show business in the early 1980s that Penn & Teller truly took off as a magical act. I don’t know exactly what to make of this pattern, but at the very least it’s a reminder that there’s usually more to any artistic success story—including more individuals to remember—than meets the eye.

2)      James Randi: Most successful artists have both personal mentors and influences and other professionals on whom they model aspects of their career, and for Penn & Teller the Amazing Randi was an example of the latter. Randi made his fame as both a magician and a skeptic, performing his own tricks but debunking those of paranormal con artists and the like (all of which he discussed in his 1980 book Flim-Flam! Psychics, ESP, Unicorns, and Other Delusions). Not long after their magic career began to take off Penn & Teller crossed over into the realm of professional skeptics as well, as illustrated for example by their long-running television show Penn & Teller: Bullshit! (I like to think the exclamation point was at least in part a nod to Randi’s book title). It’s a complicated lane to occupy, making a main living performing tricks that require folks to suspend their disbelief (or at least refuse to be explained) yet turning a disbelieving eye toward many other cultural forms and narratives. But Penn & Teller have successfully occupied it for decades, inspired to be sure by prior figures like the Amazing Randi.

3)      Television: Bullshit! is one of a few shows of their own that Penn & Teller have had over the years, but it was their countless appearances on other television shows in the 1980s and 1990s that really established the pair’s reputation and prominence. That included not only performances on late-night shows like Saturday Night Live and The Tonight Show, but also and even more tellingly both acting roles and cameos as themselves on a huge range of other shows, from Miami Vice to Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego?, The Drew Carey Show to Babylon 5, and many many more. The trend has even continued in recent years, with a 2022 appearance for example on the reality performance show The Masked Singer. Penn & Teller were far from the first magicians for whom TV was instrumental to their success, but none have better utilized that defining late 20th and early 21st century medium than did this pair.

Last MagicStudying tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Magicians or magic histories or contexts you’d highlight?