Easy Does It

It's not just about the difficulty of the questions, though, or the lack of it. As with "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire," the rules of "Are You Smarter" stack the deck in the contestant's -- and by extension, the viewer's -- favor. On "Are You Smarter," participants have virtually unlimited time to answer, and can even officially "cheat" by peeking at the answers their child partners have supplied. If the adult contestant answers incorrectly, he can still be "saved" -- that is, awarded a correct answer -- if his partner has gotten the question right.

"Millionaire" seemingly invented that sort of crutch when it ushered in the new prime-time quiz-show Dark Age in 1999. It offered contestants "lifelines" whenever its multiple-choice questions got too rugged.

Now, the prime-time NBC quiz show "1 vs. 100" makes it even easier: Instead of "Millionaire's" four multiple-choice answers, it reduces the possibilities to just three, one of which is often absurd on its face (sample "1 vs. 100" question from last week: "If Vanna White was shopping at a 'white sale,' what would she likely be buying? (a) linens; (b) a used car; (c) a vowel"). Some of the new shows have also adopted "Millionaire's" rule that enables contestants to walk away with their accumulated cash after they've reached a certain plateau -- and after they've heard the next question.

It wasn't always like this, kids.

Many of the quiz shows that riveted the nation in the 1950s were positively Einsteinian compared with today's. It was a different era, of course. TV was a new medium, and trying very hard to prove it was respectable, even educational. So shows such as "The $64,000 Question," "Dotto" and "Twenty-One" rewarded those with encyclopedic knowledge in such categories as opera, science and Shakespeare. Dr. Joyce Brothers, later to become TV's first pop psychologist, won the top prize on "The 64,000 Question" as an expert on boxing.

"By the standards of . . . a later epoch, the intellectual content of the 1950s quiz shows was downright erudite," wrote John Doherty in a history of quiz shows for the Museum of Broadcast Communications. "Almost all the questions [on these shows] involved some demonstration of cerebral aptitude -- retrieving lines of poetry, identifying dates from history, and reeling off scientific classifications, the stuff of memorization and canonical culture."

True, some of the shows were as crooked as a surgical scar, but they were still plenty smart. In their infamously fixed showdown on "Twenty-One" in the mid-1950s (dramatized four decades later in the movie "Quiz Show"), contestants Charles Van Doren and Herbert Stempel battled over biblical references, the volumes of Churchill's wartime memoirs and the names and fates of the wives of Henry VIII.

It's doubtful that anyone would have bought "Twenty-One's" scam if Van Doren had been locked in the isolation booth to sweat out the sum of five times two.

Although that heyday ended abruptly with the exposure of fixed results, more challenging games survived on the margins. "GE College Bowl" -- the name says it all -- ran from 1958 to 1970. And "Jeopardy!" helped revive the format with its debut in 1964. Like "College Bowl," "Jeopardy!" contestants had to have a wide range of knowledge, and had a strictly limited time to supply each answer. The game also required some skill at wagering.

"Jeopardy!" survives to this day, of course, but it hasn't been immune to the general pressure to dumb down, says Steve Beverly, a professor of broadcasting at Union University in Tennessee who maintains the Web site TVgameshows.net. Nowadays, he says, the categories are narrower -- fewer foreign phrases, more pop culture categories -- and the questions are often written to point toward an answer.

In "Jeopardy!'s" first incarnation, for example -- with host Art Fleming in the 1960s and early '70s -- a "Final Jeopardy!" question might contain a minimal phrase, forcing contestants to supply a fairly complex question, Beverly says. That is, in a category such as U.S. presidents, the clue might be "Our American Cousin" -- to which a correct response was some version of, "What was the name of the play Lincoln was watching when he was assassinated?"

In "Jeopardy!'s" current version, the process is inverted, so that the clue carries more hints. Today, Beverly says, host Alex Trebek might read the Lincoln question this way: "He was watching 'Our American Cousin' on the night of a fateful event." A correct question would be, "Who was Abraham Lincoln?"