AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |
Back to Blog
![]() If American Idol has taught us anything - and surely it hasn’t - it’s that regular people are really boring. ![]() ![]() The bigger problem, though, is the contestants themselves. Also, we’re not told how far in advance the polygraphs happen, so one assumes that contestants have already come clean about their tests to their wives or husbands, who watch in mock surprise from a side stage in the hope that their spouse will own up to infidelity, just so they can win the cash prize. Even so, this doesn’t stop producers from inserting long, unnecessary dramatic pauses between their answers and the reaction from Truth’s omnipotent female robot voice, who confirms or denies their honesty. First, it turns out the lie-detector tests actually take place before the show is taped, so what we see is people re-answering uncomfortable questions they’ve already been asked. So, how was last night’s episode? A huge bust, for a few reasons. After the dust settled from the scandal, he was able to make something of himself.Last night, after a passably entertaining episode of American Idol, came the series premiere of Fox’s sleazy new game show The Moment of Truth, on which average, ordinary people are connected to a polygraph machine and exposed as the philandering, tax-dodging, latently racist, elderly-hating, gambling-addicted lovers of Internet pornography that they truly are - all for the chance to win $500,000! Commercials for Truth have set expectations high (especially in our apartment), promising that each contestant will be asked 21 hilarious questions like “Have you ever thought that your boyfriend, Jeff, might be gay?,” “Have you ever been paid for sex?,” and “Have you ever had sexual relations with my sister?” He wrote several books, settled down with his wife, started a family, had children, had grandchildren, It appears that he ended up having a quiet, normal life. His career was interrupted, but he did end up becoming a teacher. “He wrote a piece for the The New Yorker in which he talked about how the only thing that really bothered him about the movie was at the end where it says on screen that Charles Van Doren never taught again, and that wasn’t true. But what of the key players of Charles Van Doren and Herb Stempel? “I feel that Van Doren was very content with his fate,” Adam muses. TV quiz and game shows changed, and eventually everyone moved on. All these years later, the lessons learned are still put into practice on today’s game shows.” Networks abandoned the practice of single sponsorship of its shows, which gave those sponsors undue influence on the content of programming. Says David, “As a result of the quiz show scandals, Congress made rigging a television game show a federal crime. As she started to leave the stand, a very nice older congressman just kind of leans into his microphone and says, ‘Now, Patty, before you leave, let me ask: Was everything that you’ve just told us the truth?’ And Patty Duke burst into tears and confessed everything that she was coached and all of that.” She gave testimony that the game wasn’t rigged and nothing bad happened. They even brought in Patty Duke, who was still a kid but who had appeared on The $64,000 Challenge, which was the spin-off of The $64,000 Question. I was told very specifically to pat my eyebrow, don’t wipe my forehead.’ So Herb Stempel was given acting lessons. You’ll notice here I’m patting my brow to get rid of the sweat. Dan Enright wanted to make sure I did that, because there was an extreme close-up and that was very expressive. He said, ‘Now at this point, I’m going to bite my bottom lip. He tried blackmailing Dan Enright at one point, but Enright recorded him demanding $50,000 or else he was going to blow the whistle to the press.”Īdam further elaborates, explaining, “When Stempel came in for his hearing, they showed kinescopes of his appearances on Twenty-One, and he was going through them point by point, showing off the acting lessons that he got from Dan Enright. So he began trying to get the attention of the press to let them know what was going on. The next thing that happened was that, and the movie, again, touches on this, he got swindled out of his winnings by some really shady investment deals. He took that quote in TV Guide very personally. “When Charles Van Doren made the cover of TV Guide,” he says, “in an adjoining article Jack Barry said, ‘This is the kind of contestant that we really want, because he’s not a freak with a sponge memory.’ Jack didn’t name a name, but Herb Stempel read that article and was convinced that that was a shot at him. The producers, according to Adam, probably felt that Stempel would fade into the background, but that didn’t happen - not helped by the fact that the former contestant felt he was being taunted.
0 Comments
Read More
Leave a Reply. |