Quiz Show

MAKE SURE your televisions are turned on Friday night, Nov. 22. That's when Barbara Walker, principal at Runnymede Elementary School, competes in "Jeopardy's Tournament of Champions," the World Series of quiz show competitions.Walker recently returned from Hollywood, where the games were taped. Notified earlier this fall that she had qualified for the tournament, she flew to California with her husband, Mickey Walker, for a whirlwind week of "Jeopardy" competition, dinners and cast parties.

BOSTON -- And you thought we had maxed out on shamelessness. That sometime during the early 1990s, someone on a tabloid TV show about a kinky, cross-dressing affair with a best friend's Rottweiler had crossed the last frontier. Finally, we had let it all hang out.Well, me too. In fact, by the time the story of the sex worker and the spinmeister came along, there was more public entertainment than private embarrassment. None of the parties seemed to be especially scandalized by this scandal.

Redfield Mason, an Indiana farm boy who helped the Navy break the Japanese military code in World War II, then won national fame when he won $100,000 on a television quiz show with an unlikely mastery of Greek and Roman mythology, died July 9 at a nursing home in Warrenton, Va. He was 91.His family said he had lived on a farm near Warrenton since his retirement from the Navy as a rear admiral in 1966.In a 45-year naval career, Admiral Mason, who grew up on a farm in Martinsville, Ind., graduated from the Naval Academy in 1925, learned Japanese at the U.S. embassy in Tokyo in the 1930s and was decorated for his command of naval support operations in the Korean War.As an intelligence officer at the Office of the Chief of Naval Operations in Washington in World War II, he helped break the Japanese code.

HERE'S A SCENE not seen in the movie "Quiz Show":The show's host asks the players, "Who was the secretary of state who went to the movies on the day the United States was preparing to invade Haiti? You have five seconds in this final round."A stiff, beady-eyed gentleman slowly moves to press the buzzer. "Why, that would be me, I think."The host grins. "Wow! You've just won our grand prize! A #F vacation around the world! Make that a permanent vacation."That's right. While former President Jimmy Carter was on his way to Haiti, along with Georgia Sen. Sam Nunn and retired Gen. Colin Powell, Warren Christopher was heading to the movies to watch "Quiz Show."

How different were the quiz shows of "Quiz Show" days from today's televised games?About as different as naming the opera Puccini never completed vs. naming something you buy at the hardware store (based on 100 people surveyed).But the generational gap goes far beyond "Turandot" vs. turpentine. Compared to today's game shows, the 1950s genre featured in the Robert Redford-directed movie differed in question content, show style and even time period -- literally, a matter of night and day.Some game-show changes had to do with the shocking scandal that erupted around "Twenty-One," the program featured in "Quiz Show," and other games in the late 1950s.

WASHINGTON -- Robert Redford calls "Quiz Show" a parable about "the eternal struggle between ethics and capitalism." It's no wonder that he explores television, an arena where ethics and capitalism clash all the time.In "Quiz Show," capitalism triumphs. The networks and producers, hungry for ratings and profits, deceive their viewers by fixing the results of the quiz shows.But the reality of television is more complex.The networks weren't wholly to blame for the quiz show scandals. Fakery isn't an easy thing to define, then or now. And television, for all its flaws, often manages to rise above commerce to serve the public.

I'm disappointed to learn that I blindly missed a defining moment in American history.This has come to my attention in the many gushing reviews of a new movie called "Quiz Show."The movie is loosely based on the true story of how a popular TV quiz show from the 1950s called "Twenty-One" was rigged to heighten suspense and boost ratings and profits.Most of the critics say the movie is of great significance because the quiz-show scandal marked the loss of our national innocence.Americans were supposedly stunned to discover that they couldn't believe everything they saw on their rabbit-eared TV sets.

Oh, how important are the little things.For years the phone rings and one picks it up to hear: "Is this Stephen Hunter? Please hold for Mr. Big."The seconds pass. Eventually, out of some telephonic ether, from a place where time doesn't exist, Mr. Big himself comes on, unruffled, unbothered, only slightly aware that the person holding the phone at your end registers on the radar of humanity.This time, however, the old horn goes jingle-jangle, and when a reporter picks it up, he hears the incredible: "Steve . . . Bob Redford."

You may not know actor Ralph Fiennes. But if you saw "Schindler's List," you surely know his work.In Steven Spielberg's powerful film opus about the Holocaust, it was Mr. Fiennes who delivered the gut-wrenching portrayal of Amon Goeth, the ruthless and remorseless commandant of the World War II concentration camp. One memorable image: Mr. Fiennes, as the bloated and coolly maniacal Goeth, rolls out of bed one morning, reaches for his high-powered rifle, then strolls to the balcony, where he takes aim and unblinkingly executes an unsuspecting internee.

It is a signal mark of "Quiz Show's" brilliant peculiarity that it contains a line that has never been in an American movie and never will be again."Oh, I meant to watch your show, Charles," a plummy, smug Mark Van Doren says to his son, "but Bunny Wilson was over and you know how carried away Bunny gets!"A facsimile of Bunny Wilson, better known as America's most brilliant literary critic Edmund Wilson, even appears: he's a pink, round, vigorous gentleman, a knight at the rectangular picnic table of American culture that is about to be overthrown by a Modred called television, whose prime champion would be none other than that same Charles Van Doren.