Guesswork

Hundreds of people storm the networks every week with ideas for new TV programs. Most of them come suggesting quiz shows. Says CBS's Hubbell Robinson Jr., vice president in charge of TV programming: "Everybody thinks he can do a quiz. There are more amateurs running wild in this area than in any other. They're absolutely undaunted by the difficulties."

What the amateurs are after is a formula as successful as the one thought up by a family named Van Deventer, who used to play the old parlor game, 20 Questions, in their Detroit living room after dinner. In 1946, Fred Van Deventer moved himself, his wife and the game onto radio. In 1949, 20 Questions went on TV and the Van Deventers added their 15-year-old son to the panel. It has been flourishing on Du Mont for three years.

The networks and advertisers like TV parlor games because they are cheap. 20 Questions costs only a modest $3,500 a week. Quiz shows have no script cost, the same stage set can be used year in and year out, and the performers are far less expensive than big-name comedians or singers. But one sad discovery has tempered the networks' enthusiasm. Explains Robinson: "Except for the rare ones, quiz shows have a very definite audience ceiling."

Money & Prizes. The rarest of the rare ones is You Bet Your Life, a quiz show that is little more than an excuse for Groucho Marx, in his cheerful way, to insult six contestants a night. Other unemployed funnymen have tried in vain to duplicate Groucho's success. Fred Allen just does not seem right on NBC's Judge for Yourself, and Herb Shriner on CBS's Two for the Money is far from rivaling Groucho's hold on his audience. When the wit falters, quiz shows usually try to make up for it by giving away quantities of money and prizes.

The appeal that Groucho generates singlehanded is most nearly duplicated by CBS's What's My Line?, which also comes alive more through its star personalities (John Daly, Arlene Francis, Steve Allen, Bennett Cerf, Dorothy Kilgallen) than through its intellectual teasing. It has spawned a great many imitators, ranging from I've Got a Secret, whose panelists have to guess secrets that contestants eagerly share with several million televiewers, to self-explanatory shows like The Name's the Same and Who Said That?

What Future? Quiz show thinking has become so threadbare that the newest of the shows, ABC's Who's the Boss?, is virtually a carbon copy of the four-year-old What's My Line? In this program panelists are faced with the problem of guessing, not what the contestant (a private secretary) does, but what her boss does and who he is.

In general, the more money a quiz show gives away the less entertainment it offers. By this standard, Strike It Rich, Break the Bank and a dozen others rate even below daytime soap operas as adult amusement. Quiz shows, which currently make up about 20% of network programming, have been gradually dropping in popularity. Each summer the percentage makes a sudden rise as inexpensive quizzes are thrown into the breach left by vacationing winter shows, but few of them survive into the following season. One network executive may have been speaking for most of the industry when, asked what he thinks about the future of TV quiz shows, he answered: "I think about them as little as possible."

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