Payoff

Losing challengers received $1,000 as a consolation prize. Rather than receiving a dollar value multiplied by the point difference after winning each game, champions received progressively larger amounts for each opponent defeated.

All amounts are cumulative; in the first playout structure, winning four games would be worth $1,000,000. After winning a fourth game, the contestant started the chain again at $100,000 for defeating a fifth opponent, $200,000 for defeating a sixth, and so on. After a few early episodes, the number of matches required to win $1,000,000 increased; winning seven games would now be worth at least $2,675,000. As before, any contestant who defeated a seventh opponent started from the beginning of the chain.

When the rules changed, the returning champion had won one game and $100,000 in his appearance on the final show under the old prize structure. Instead of being "grandfathered" under the old prize structure, he played and won his second game for $250,000 (the next amount after $100,000), and played but lost his third game for $500,000.

Under both prize structures, champions remained on the show until being defeated, as in the original version. However, unlike the original show, new champions' winnings were not deducted from the totals of dethroned ones.

Contestant selection

During the first six episodes, the audience chose the winner's next opponent. The audience would be presented with two potential challengers to face the current champion, and the audience would vote for an opponent using keypads. The person who received the higher vote played against the champion; the other person would be one of the two potential challengers to be voted upon for the next game. In the first episode, there were three potential opponents to face the champion. After the sixth episode, the process was changed to a random selection. At the beginning of the show, six potential challengers would be introduced, and would be selected randomly from that group for each new game. People who had not been selected by the end of the show were not guaranteed to return on the following show, although some did appear on the show multiple times before being selected to play.

Bonus round: Perfect 21

The champion was asked a maximum of six true/false questions in a single category, starting at one point and increasing by one per question, to a maximum value of six. After any correct answer, the champion could stop playing and receive $10,000 per point; an incorrect answer ended the round and forfeited this money. Correctly answering all six questions won the top prize of $210,000.

Charles Van Doren

Charles Van Doren in the isolation booth on the quiz show Twenty-One, with host Jack Barry (1957)

College professor Charles Van Doren (1926–2019) was introduced as a contestant on Twenty-One on November 28, 1956, as a challenger to champion Herbert Stempel (1926–2020), a dominant contestant who had become somewhat unpopular with viewers and eventually the sponsor. Van Doren and Stempel played to a series of four 21–21 games, with audience interest building with each passing week and each new game, until Van Doren eventually prevailed.

The film Quiz Show depicts the turning point as a question for Stempel, asking him to name the film that won the Academy Award for Best Motion Picture for 1955.^[7] Stempel knew the correct answer to be Marty, as it was one of his favorite films. The producers ordered him to answer the question with 1954's Best Motion Picture winner, On the Waterfront. Stempel later recalled that there was a moment in the booth when his conscience and sense of fair play warred with his sense of obligation. He almost disrupted the scripted outcome by giving the correct answer. Stempel answered incorrectly as he was instructed, but redeemed himself by staying in the game and earning enough points to tie Van Doren's score, unlike the depiction of events in Quiz Show. Stempel was finally defeated in the next game. The surviving kinescope of the broadcast shows Stempel failing to come up with the title of William Allen White's August 15, 1896 editorial in the Emporia Gazette titled "What's the Matter with Kansas?" After the missed question, Van Doren quit with 18 points, which was enough to win. Van Doren's victory began one of the longest and most storied runs of any champion in the history of television game shows. His popularity soared as a result of his success, earning him a place on the cover of Time magazine and even a regular feature spot on NBC's Today show; at one point, the program even surpassed CBS' I Love Lucy in the ratings. He was finally unseated as champion by Vivienne Wax Nearing (1926–2007) on March 11, 1957, after having won a total of $129,000 (the equivalent of $1,344,107 today).

In the meantime, Stempel, disgruntled over being ordered to lose, attempted to blow the whistle on Twenty-One, even going so far as to have a federal investigator look into the show. Initially, little came of these investigations and Stempel's accusations were dismissed as jealousy because there was no hard evidence to back up his claims. While a congressional investigation did affect Twenty-One during this period, the much larger ongoing investigation was the HUAC hearings into possible communists in entertainment; the show's director, Charles S. Dubin, was fired by NBC in June 1958 after he refused to answer whether he had ever been a member of the Communist Party USA.^[8]

In August 1958, the popular CBS daytime game show Dotto was abruptly canceled after a contestant found a notebook containing the answers to every question that was to be asked to the show's current champion, future journalist Marie Winn. Stempel's allegations about Twenty-One began to gain credibility. A grand jury was convened in Autumn 1958 to investigate Dotto and other possible game-show fixing, investigated by Joseph Stone, the assistant district attorney of New York. Stone said in his book Prime Time and Misdemeanors that question writer Glorianne Rader was instructed by Dan Enright and associate producer Albert Freedman, who had chosen the categories for the next broadcast earlier in the week, to place the questions in Barry's dispensing machine a few minutes before airtime; this was done to avoid any slip-ups in the planned outcome. Stone contacted former Twenty-One contestants, including Richard Jackman, who confessed to the fixing of the show.^[6] Three days after Jackman's confession,^[6] and without advance public warning, Twenty-One was canceled after its broadcast of October 17, 1958, amid plummeting ratings. A nighttime version of Concentration took over its time slot the following week.

Further eroding Barry and Enright's claims of honesty, another former contestant, James Snodgrass, came forward with corroborating proof that the show had been rigged: using a series of registered letters that he had mailed to himself, Snodgrass documented every answer for which he was coached prior to airtime. He testified before Congress in 1959.^[9]

The scandal forced producers Barry and Enright into virtual exile. Barry did not host another national TV show for more than a decade, and Enright moved to Canada to continue his production career.

Aftermath

The scandal also caused the Federal Communications Commission to mandate the sale of Barry-Enright's radio station in Hollywood, Florida, WGMA (now WLQY). The station was purchased by its general manager, C. Edward Little, who promptly affiliated the station with the Mutual Broadcasting System. After serving for a time as the head of Mutual's affiliates association, Little became the president of Mutual from 1972 to 1979. During this time Little created the Mutual Black Network, the first U.S. broadcast network catering exclusively to African-Americans, in addition to the Mutual Spanish Network and the Mutual Southwest Network. Under Little's administration, Mutual became the first commercial broadcasting entity to use satellite technology for program delivery. During his tenure as head of Mutual, Little hired Larry King to host an all-night phone-in talk show Little had created. King was a one-time announcer for Little at WGMA. King, who had previously hosted a similar morning show on Miami radio station WIOD, went on to national fame on both radio and television, winning a coveted Peabody Award along the way.

Barry would be able to acquire another radio station in the late-1960s: a Los Angeles-area radio station (KKOP 93.5 FM, Redondo Beach, later renamed KFOX, now KDAY). Barry would later say he bought the station specifically because it would require him to have a license from the FCC, and that if the FCC were willing to grant him a license, it would decisively demonstrate that his reputation was no longer "tainted" by the game show scandals.^[10] Soon after his acquisition of KKOP, Barry finally returned to network game-show hosting in 1969, succeeding Dennis Wholey on ABC's The Generation Gap, for which he publicly thanked the producers and ABC for giving him a chance for a comeback. In 1971, he sold ABC his first new game show, The Reel Game, which he also hosted; it ran for 13 weeks. He became a success again as a producer-host with The Joker's Wild, which ran on CBS from 1972 to 1975 and in syndication from 1977–1986 (Barry died in May 1984 and was replaced by Bill Cullen for the final two years); it also saw a revival in syndication for one season in 1990. Enright would work as Joker's executive producer in the show's final year on CBS, and the two revived their partnership full-time in 1976, reviving Tic-Tac-Dough, which ran until 1986. It was revived once more but was canceled after a few months. Enright died in 1992.^[11]