Encore Podcast: The Quiz Show Scandals - "The $64,000 Question"




During the summer of 1955, a new TV show kept people in front of their sets on hot Tuesday nights. “The $64,000 Question” was a big-money quiz show that made its contestants instant celebrities and the show even displaced “I Love Lucy” as the nation’s top TV program. What nobody realized at the time was that the show was planned, paced and cast like a drama, and a contestant’s success depended not on the questions he or she answered correctly, but on a sponsor who would drop you when you ceased to be useful.


Sources:
TV Game Shows, by Maxine Fabe
“The Cop and the $64,000 Question,” TV Guide, July 9, 1955
“A Summer Show Hits the Jackpot: $64,000 Prize, Carefully Picked Contestants Keep Nation Glued to Its Television Sets,” TV Guide, August 20, 1955
“Come and Get It: TV Giveaway Shows Lure Viewers with Bigger and Bigger Jackpots,” TV Guide, December 31, 1955
“The Quiz Show Scandals: An Editorial,” TV Guide, October 24, 1959
“Letters,” TV Guide, November 21, 1959

Encore podcast: "The Andy Griffith Show" and How It Grew



"The Andy Griffith Show” is Griffith’s best work — certainly his most personal. It was never out of TV’s Top 10 programs for its entire eight-season run, and it inspired a spinoff series, a TV movies and several reunion specials. Fifty years after it left the air, the reruns continue. Griffith never won an Emmy Award, but he was the guiding creative force behind the show, building it into a situation comedy with heart as well as humor — and shaping the relationship between himself and Don Knotts, as deputy Barney Fife, to reflect the relationship between two friends in one of his favorite radio shows, the comic serial “Lum and Abner.”

Sources:
"Andy Griffith: Cornball with the Steel-Trap Mind," Lee Edson, TV Guide, January 28 and February 4, 1961
" 'The Andy Griffith Show' Has H.A.Q. (High Acceptability Quotient)," TV Guide, May 11, 1963
"The Wondrous Andy Griffith TV Machine," Richard Warren Lewis, TV Guide, July 13 and July 20, 1968
The Andy Griffith Show, by Richard Kelly
The Andy Griffith Show Book, by Ken Beck and Jim Clark
"Richard Linke, Andy Griffith's Talent Manager, Dies at 98," Sam Roberts, The New York Times, June 20, 2016