Quiz show

1930s–1950s

Truth or Consequences was the first game show to air on commercially licensed television; CBS Television Quiz followed shortly thereafter as the first to be regularly scheduled. The first episode of each aired in 1941 as an experimental broadcast. Over the course of the 1950s, as television began to pervade the popular culture, game shows quickly became a fixture. Daytime game shows would be played for lower stakes to target stay-at-home housewives. Higher-stakes programs would air in prime time. (One particular exception in this era was You Bet Your Life, ostensibly a game show, but the game show concept was largely a framework for a talk show moderated by its host, Groucho Marx.) During the late 1950s, high-stakes games such as Twenty-One and The $64,000 Question began a rapid rise in popularity. However, the rise of quiz shows proved to be short-lived. In 1959, many of the higher stakes game shows were exposed as being either biased or outright scripted in the 1950s quiz show scandals and ratings declines led to most of the primetime games being canceled.