Twenty-One (1956–1958) User Reviews

On the principles of blackjack

[bkoganbing · 7/10 · 25 March 2015]

I should have been in bed at the age of 9 when Twenty-One came on. But I would try to listen on the stairs as this quiz show got all of America buzzing as to who would make 21 and win.

The show operated on the principles of blackjack. Instead of drawing cards you drew questions with a difficulty level from to 11. The first to reach 21 won the prize. If you drew number one the question might be something on the order of Who's buried in Grant's Tomb? But no one drew those.

Reportedly Jack Barry and Dan Enright tried to make it legitimate at first but the ratings almost sank the show. After that it was trying to get contestants like you would search today for a reality series.

The high water mark of the show and by this time there were any number of other quiz shows doing the same, some under the Barry-Enright banner, some not was when Charles Van Doren, the Columbia professor with the distinguished family name became the reigning champion defeating geeky Herbert Stempel from Queens. In his own way Stempel became the Howard Beale of quiz shows, eliminated for bad ratings.

But Herbie wouldn't stay down. He blew the lid and Van Doren who was something of an intellectual matinée idol was ruined. As the probe from Congress extended to the rest of quiz shows they went during the late Fifties in a massacre. The only ones left were the harmless parlor game type shows with small pay outs.

I remember Jack Barry was a good host who never let his own personality intrude into the contestants and their mission. Which was apparently to put on a good show rather than really show off their knowledge.

I remember to this day a line from the Ed Sullivan Show by I believe Alan King who said, "who would have thought the most honest thing on television was wrestling?"

The show that ended an era

[e-jane · 12 May 1999]

In its heyday, Twenty-One was more than a game show. It was a cultural icon, a symbol of hope and inspiration for the millions who gathered around the TV to watch it. It thrust Professor Charles van Doren into the spotlight as a sort of intellectual Everyman, and he too became an icon of the values and morality of the 1950s.

Which made it all the more heartbreaking when it all came crashing down (as immortalized in Robert Redford's brilliant film 'Quiz Show'). The whole show was proven to be rigged and faked; the contestants frauds, van Doren included; the whole nation ended shocked and ultimately disappointed.

Twenty-One, which exists now mostly as a symbol, marked the demise of the era and the decline of morality.

Are things so different today?

[schappe1 · 5/10 · 9 February 2008]

This is the notorious show that got the quiz show scandals rolling. The episode I watched, (from the "Classic Television" DVD, available from PBS), does not contain the famous confrontation between Charles Van Doren and Herbert Stempel, (in which the unpopular Stempel was ordered to get an answer wrong and almost answered it right to screw the producers). Instead it's the second week of a confrontation between two other contestants, (I didn't write down their names), who redid a game because of a disputed answer.

They show the contestants sweating it out in the "isolation booths", (designed so that they didn't hear the answers of their rivals). Some of the questions were obtainable with knowledge of general history, (Who were the winning and losing generals at the battle of Saratoga?). Some of them, such as a list of members of the Continental Congress and what they did, seemed more esoteric, but that's because I didn't know the answers. The knowledge that contestants were being fed answers makes one squirm all the more as they search the far reaches of their minds for them. But it looks so much like similar moments in "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?" that you have to wonder what is going on now.

Some additional information

[bpatrick-8 · 1 November 2015]

The game which had to be replayed because of a mixup was between Hank Bloomgarden, who had $52,500, and James Snodgrass. Playing at $3500 a point Snodgrass asked for a five-part question on the bones in the spinal column. At one point he said "sacrum" instead of "sacral," and Barry called it wrong. Requesting the same question, Bloomgarden answered "coccyx" instead of "coccygeal," and was counted right and declared the winner. After the show, the NBC switchboard was jammed with calls from doctors and nurses saying that Bloomgarden's answer should be called wrong; Barry and Dan Enright ultimately agreed, meaning a replay at $3500 a point. The two contestants tied again and had to play at $4000 a point. In order to get Snodgrass off, he was given two parts of a four-part question on third world leaders and actually answered three right on the air. Bloomgarden went on to win a final total of $98,500, losing $17,500 to a dairy farmer named Harold Craig.

But both Snodgrass and Craig got the last laugh. Snodgrass had mailed registered letters to himself before each broadcast, with the answers and directions on how to give those answers in great detail. They meshed with everything the investigators saw on the kinescopes. Joe Stone always said it was Craig, however, who really convinced him that "Twenty-One" was rigged; he concluded that Craig's honesty could not be faked since, before his meeting with Stone, Craig had been literally reduced to tears by some assistant DAs trying to intimidate him. But Craig's story meshed with those of Stempel and Snodgrass in every detail. It was too bad that part of the investigation wasn't included in "Quiz Show," nor was Stone's role.

Had I been old enough in the '50s (and I do remember asking my dad about the headphones, which I called "funny hats"--well, I was only about three) and unaware of the rigging, I would have found "Twenty- One" to be an exciting and suspenseful show. Now, as a history teacher, I find it to be an integral part of '50s culture and, if not symbolic of a decline in morality, certainly a symbol of a decline in ethics on the part of the sponsor, producers, and contestants.