Quizzing America

Mom, apple pie, and The $64,000 Question. Nothing was more American in the 1950s than the TV quiz show, which both illuminated and mirrored all the hopes, dreams, fads and faults of a nation-come-of-age. Using the quiz show as unique video roadmap into the soul and zeitgeist of a proud republic, Mark Dunn playfully captures in [1950s Game Shows and American Culture] aspects of the iconography of a mid-century United States within the context of TV game playing, prize-winning, and collective self-examination.

Dunn devotes the book’s chapters to the various ways in which the country viewed women, minorities, gays, and teens, the eccentricities of the American worker, New York City, the onslaught of Communism and the country’s over-reactive response to it, the news-making events of the day, shadowed by events of the past, all within the parameters of the 1950s television game show—a phenomenon that had become cultural touchstone for the decade. [1950s Game Shows and American Culture] also visits the scandals that marred the genre’s reputation, and drew back the curtain on the propensity for both gullibility and winking cynicism among Americans—a cynicism that would color (but not too harshly), the way the country viewed its magic, rabbit-eared box, and the wonderful, whimsical games people played inside it.