I have achieved the American Dream; I have won a car on television. This overstatement about success is mildly amusing because it’s true; perhaps also a little eccentric in my case since people expect “Berkeley Professors” to be unconcerned with such mundane and material expressions of personality as their cars, particularly if acquired by competing on a literally “trivial” television quiz show.
Besides, I chose a Corvette, an overpowered, adolescent dream car if ever there was one. However even Berkeley professors more august and austere than I set some store by the ethos projected by their cars. The Dwinelle Hall parking lot at UC Berkeley these days looks like a Prius dealer’s showroom—which makes a change since it used to look like a corporate display of Volvo station wagons.
A Booklist review of a car photo book, Roadside America: The Automobile and the American Dream, by Lucinda Lewis, puts it baldly: “One of pop culture’s universal truths is that Americans have carried on an unabashed romance with the automobile since its invention around the turn of the twentieth century.” Aldous Huxley was not far off in 1932 when he had his characters in Brave New World making the sign of the “T” in memorial worship of Henry Ford and his first great automotive creation. It’s difficult to imagine contestants on British or German game shows jumping up and down and yelling at the very mention of the fact that they might win a car, but a glance at YouTube is all it takes to see that it is normal behavior on American game shows.
America’s fascination with the automobile does not require deep analysis to link to a larger set of cultural attitudes and values. America is big. The traditional way to make your way or to escape annoying entanglements or to reinvent yourself is, as Huckleberry Finn puts it, to “light out for the territory.” As Horace Greeley famously said, “Go West, young man” (although at the time he was talking about Illinois!).
Driving a car is an American rite of passage, symbolizing our adherence to the values of personal autonomy and freedom to travel at a moment’s notice. De Tocqueville never saw an automobile, but he would have recognized its appeal to his new Americans. Jeopardy! no longer awards cars to five-game winners (and, in fact, no longer restricts winning to five regular-season games) but in every other respect is a kind of model not only of American television game shows, but of a particular set of American values which, in their profile, differ from those of other cultures.
One way of defining a “culture” is as a set of values shared by some group of people that does not overlap perfectly with the values of another set of people. What constitutes living the good life, a question that has interested philosophers since ancient Athens, for a great many modern Americans apparently involves having a really cool car. Winning one in public, on television, apparently enhances the experience of “good living.”
Jeopardy! was begotten in the wake of the Quiz Show Scandals of the 1960s. In 1964, casting about for an idea for a new game show, and one which could evade the accusation of giving the contestants the answers, Merv Griffin asked his wife for her ideas. She replied (according to Merv’s story) “5,280 feet.” “What is a mile?” replied Merv, and the problem was solved.
The gimmick of the show was that the contestants were given the answers ON THE AIR, IN PUBLIC, and had to come up with the questions. Notably, contestants had to frame their responses in the form of a question. (“Who is George Washington, Alex?) Additionally, wrong answers carried the penalty of a loss of the money value of the clue, hence the show’s name. The answer-in-the-form-of-a-question format is merely a semantic evasion, but the public was apparently ready for a new quiz show, and Jeopardy! has been on the air in two incarnations since 1964. Jeopardy!’s extraordinary longevity (1964–79 and 1984 to at least 2014 under the current contract) underlines and validates its status as a mirror of general American cultural values. Jeopardy!’s central characteristics give at least a partial answer to the question, “What does it mean to be an American, Alex?”
People like what they value. Fads (Jersey Shore and its clones, American Idol and its ilk) come and go. “Entertainment” that lasts for decades clearly speaks to the culture it addresses. So how does Jeopardy! exemplify a specifically American set of values, of things that Americans think define them and their culture, things that constitute “living well” as an American?
It’s not that other cultures don’t enjoy contests; it’s just that we seem to require them in a great many more venues. Compare the huge success in the US of Survivor, which pits poorly prepared people against one another for thirty-nine days in a remote wilderness, with its very weak performance in Europe. Much more popular in the UK was I’m a Celebrity, Get Me Out of Here, which used a similar format to expose the weaknesses of minor celebrities under similar circumstances; the contest being secondary to the ridicule.
In Big Brother, a dozen or so people are confined in closed house and garden for a month with no outside contact (or reading material) voting each other out one by one as the show progresses. European versions of the show are about humiliation (dividing the contestants into guards and prisoners, for instance) and class conflict (“You’ve never had to work a day in your life, you posh twit!” “You’ve never wanted to work a day in your life you dole-sucking parasite!”) The American version, however, while it started by imitating the original Dutch version closely, has now evolved into a series of contests for Head of Household, and Veto Power, with the recriminations and class warfare severely limited, in terms of air-time at least.
Jeopardy! is pure contest: who gets on the show in the first place (about four hundred contestants per year out of twenty-four thousand or more people who take the qualifying test), who presses the signaling device first, who answers the questions correctly, and who places optimal bets on the Daily Doubles and Final Jeopardy!, all the while risking loss of their accumulated winnings by answering wrong. The same is true of the other two longest running game shows, The Price Is Right, and Wheel of Fortune. In each case you must compete against other contestants as well as against the show itself.
Why do Americans like this kind of competition? I think that the display of such “fair” competitions reinforces the American faith in classless meritocracy. We like to see an open contest with equal rules for all. We see no shame in losing such a contest to a better player on the day. Jeopardy!, by the way, like a political campaign, is winner take all. There is no advantage to saving, say five thousand dollars, at the end of the game. If you do not win, you get either two thousand dollars for second place or one thousand dollars for finishing third—probably just enough to cover your travel expenses to Los Angeles, which are not paid by the show, except during the annual tournament.
When Jeopardy! first appeared on television in 1964, contestants were permitted to ring in as soon as they thought that they knew the answers. This practice led to a faster-paced game and many more wrong guesses, but it was soon dropped in favor of the present system of allowing host Alex Trebek to complete the reading of the clue before making the contestant’s signaling devices “live.” The change was apparently made to allow the television audience to play along on an equal footing with the on-air players, thus emphasizing the equalitarian nature of the game.
The Price Is Right and Wheel of Fortune share this play-along structure. I have occasionally been clever enough to guess the correct solution on Wheel of Fortune while watching the show on television before Vanna White has turned over any of the letters! It’s almost as good as being on the show, except you don’t win any money.
In common with The Price Is Right and Wheel of Fortune, Jeopardy! has significant elements of possible redemption. First, there are the Daily Doubles, (one in the first round of the game, and two in the second round, in which the value of the clues is double that of the first round.) Daily Doubles allow the player who buzzes in on them to bet an amount up to the total of his winnings to that point in the game, or, up to the amount of the highest value clue in the round—one thousand dollars in round one, two thousand in round two.
The Daily Doubles are randomly placed on the board. So a contestant with only half the money of the leader can, at one stroke, share the lead. Likewise, the final question of the show, Final Jeopardy!, allows the players to bet all their accumulated money, also allowing for, and often producing, a come-from-behind victory. Wheel of Fortune has “bankrupt” and “lose a turn” spaces on the wheel that can derail a winning player’s chance at a winning round, as well as a final round in which each player plays one turn at a time, also allowing for surprise comebacks.
In The Price Is Right, even contestants who have failed in their on-stage efforts to win prizes are given a chance to play in the big final round by spinning a wheel of fortune at two points in the game. Survivor and Big Brother have both brought ousted players back into the game, and Survivor actually created last season what they called “Redemption Island,” where ousted players competed to get back in the main game (a ploy also adopted on Top Chef Texas this season.)
Winning the “Veto” contest in Big Brother allows the contestant to remove him or herself (or an ally) from consideration for eviction. Survivor contestants can win (or find) “immunity idols” that can be used to save them from eviction at the last minute. European game shows rarely if ever have these redemptive features. American society is permeated, to a degree scarcely imaginable outside it, with the Christian presumption of Redemption.
Game shows don’t openly (or even, I suspect, covertly) rely on Jesus for redemption. They instead rely on the American adherence to notions of self-reinvention and second chances for everyone. This belief is of a piece with “lighting out for the territory.” We can always start over, try something new, be a better person. Cassius Clay can become Muhammad Ali. Debutant Patty Hearst can become the revolutionary Tanya, and then suburban housewife Patty Hearst again. Marion Barry can be re-elected mayor of Washington DC in spite of the videotapes of him buying and using cocaine. General Motors can emerge from bankruptcy leaner, better, and more profitable. We can all diet, work out, study yoga, or tai chi, or vegan cooking, or whatever.
Jeopardy! has the dreaded buzzer, though if you call it that, someone on the show immediately corrects you to “signaling device.” No one knows why. Maybe “buzzer” is trademarked. The Jeopardy! folks are dead serious about this, though.
The difficulty of the buzzer is easy to underestimate from a distance. It’s a small tube, not unlike a thick ballpoint pen, with a button at the end to depress to “buzz in.” The button has about a quarter of an inch of play before it makes contact. The trick is this: you are not allowed to buzz in until Alex Trebek has officially finished reading the “answer” prompt. When his mouth has closed at the end of the question for some small fragment of time, one of the Jeopardy! staff, at the writer’s and producer’s table out of the sight of the contestants, flicks a switch to activate the buzzers as well as a string of tiny lights, “go lights,” (never shown on your home TV) around the Answer Board TV array.
If you buzz in before the switch is thrown your buzzer is locked out for one fifth of a second. If you tie with another buzzer, both buzzers are locked out for a fifth of a second. Here’s the problem: if you wait until your brain has actually registered that the little lights have come on, you will almost certainly be too late. It’s all about feeling the rhythm. In his excellent book about his triumphs and failures on Jeopardy! and in life,
Prisoner of Trebekistan, Bob Harris explains the difficulty.
In the U.S., standard video zips by at 29.97 frames per second. In advanced games multiple players often twitch [the sign that they are buzzing in, even if the buzzer hand is out of sight] within three frames. So in tournament play all three thumbs might go clicketyclicketyclick in under one tenth of a second. Just for comparison, a 90-mph fast ball takes 0.45 seconds to reach the batter. Most coaches think it takes about half that time to recognize a pitch and begin a good swing. Therefore the reflex of a .300 hitter takes two tenths of a second. Twice as long. On rare occasions all three contestants will twitch within a single video frame. One third of one tenth of a second. About 30 milliseconds. (p. 180)
In tournament play, the little “go lights” are often not seen to go on by the contestants or the audience, as tungsten filaments take longer than that to begin to glow. Wheel of Fortune involves the contestants in bending over a bar and physically spinning a large horizontal wheel. The Price Is Right often has contestants rolling giant dice, dropping giant plinko chips, putting a golf ball, running back and forth to replace prices and pull levers and the like, not to mention spinning the giant, vertical “redemption” wheel. Survivor and Big Brother have extremely physical contests and races that have, on both shows, sometimes resulted in physical injury to the players.
Only rare European game shows have physical contests beyond pressing a buzzer. Really physical games like It’s a Knockout are rarities, not the rule. Part of Americans’ readiness for the frontier is, apparently, a psychological readiness to defeat the wilderness with our bare hands. When we have lit out for the territory, we evidently expect to build a sod house with our own hands and rassle bears whenever necessary.
Because of the nature of many of the questions on Jeopardy! thinking creatively and improvisationally is a necessity for playing at all well. In addition to purely informational answers (called “pure trivia” by quiznerds) such as “Latin for ‘swaddling clothes,’ they’re books printed before 1501, in the infancy of typography,” (What are incunabula?) many Jeopardy! prompts require “teasing out” (quiznerds term again) the correct response. For example, in the Before and After category, “Sultan of Swat makes it to the Supreme Court” (who is Babe Ruth Bader Ginsburg?)
Confidence in your own ability to reason swiftly is essential to competing successfully at Jeopardy! because often you have to decide to buzz in before you actually call the answer to your mind. You have to judge “I know this” or “I don’t know this” without actually coming up with the answer in your head, because if you wait until you are sure, the other contestants (and note the agonistic term) will eat your lunch.
In analyzing my own games, I have also noticed that a wrong answer rate of around ten percent is about right. Lower, and you are not buzzing in on enough questions to win, higher, and you will lose too much money to win. The Price Is Right requires contestants to estimate prices as closely as possible without going over the actual retail price and also presents contestants with a bewildering array of stupid activities as part of the guessing process. To win you need to be awfully lucky or pretty quick on your feet mentally.
In Wheel of Fortune (essentially the one letter at a time spelling game known as Ghost) you need to be able to recognize word and phrase shapes faster than the other players in order to win. Big Brother and Survivor both depend upon constantly changing strategy to keep your allies and evict your enemies as the numbers of both dwindle and the need to betray your allies grows. On the American frontier, you apparently still need to be ready for anything: Indians, strange animals, alkali water and Jimson weed; gold.
Among the most frequent categories on Jeopardy! over the years are: Literature, Science, World Geography, Shakespeare, Word Origins, US Presidents, State Capitals, American History, Opera, Ballet, Sports, and Business and Industry. It’s common knowledge among Jeopardy! geeks that all Belgian surrealists are René Magritte, all Finnish composers are Sibelius, and all American silversmiths are Paul Revere. What has often been derided as “middlebrow” culture, as opposed to the superior “highbrow” variety, is actually a set of cultural commonplaces, things generally regarded as worth reading, knowing, seeing, tasting, and visiting even by those with little or no interest in the particular cultural items that make up the set.
The person who has seen a summer stock production or film version of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar is a middlebrow. The person who knows that Shakespeare’s source for the story was Plutarch’s Lives and who has seen it performed by the Royal Shakespeare Company used to be called a highbrow, but in our present postmodern world of cultural fragmentation is probably called a drama nerd.
The virtue of middlebrow culture, formerly exemplified by such events as the Ed Sullivan Show, the Boston Pops, Life magazine, and the Book of the Month Club, is that it defines things that are thought by many to be worth something both to individual “culture” and to the cultural life of the community. These are things with ascribed value in the culture and, as such, represent what the culture considers “good” and worth incorporating in your life. If you wish to live the (American) good life, these are things you must know, if only to reject some of them. Middlebrow taste is a powerful form of communication within a society and between societies. Americans have bought a lot of tickets to the films of Jerry Lewis; the French have made him a Commander of the Legion of Honor.
The concentration of categories on Jeopardy! and the repetitive information required to respond to the questions correctly is a kind of primer of middlebrow cultural information. Jeopardy! players are expected to know the name and reputation of Magritte as a Belgian surrealist, but not that of his colleague and collaborator E.L.T. Mesens. Accepted canons of knowledge have fragmented everywhere, but Jeopardy! keeps both the notion and the substance of this sort of valuable, communicative, cultural capital alive in its American incarnation. Bob Harris wrote, flatteringly, that he was initially worried about facing me in the Jeopardy! tournament because he judged that I had actually read all the books that he had memorized the titles of, thus nicely drawing the brow line between middle- and high-.
Unsurprisingly, many who consider themselves intellectuals have mixed or negative feelings about television, let alone about television game shows. Winning prizes and money can potentially be seen as too detached from actual work to be morally admirable, and certainly many in a university environment consider themselves to be deep and complex thinkers, above the recall of mere “trivia.” Hugh of St. Victor, the twelfth-century thinker, urged, “Learn everything, and you will see afterward that nothing is useless,” but there seem to be many who believe that learning some sorts of things is indeed useless, or at least, wish to give the impression that some things are beneath them, the “highbrow wannabes.” Even among American intellectuals, it seems, there is an ironic thread of anti-intellectualism. “So, you think you’re smarter than me?” remains the dark underbelly of American equalitarianism.
The fact that Jeopardy! attracts the kind of criticism it does is further evidence that it has a strong cultural presence. After my first appearance on Jeopardy! I was struck by how many of my university colleagues felt the need to explain to me that they had seen me on the show when they had picked up the baby-sitter, or driven past a hardware store with a TV in the window, or stopped next door to borrow a copy of Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling. The only man amongst my professorial colleagues that Diogenes would have sought out was the late distinguished philosopher Wallace Matson who emailed me that I had “fulfilled his Walter Mitty fantasy.” From my own point of view, rapid recall doesn’t prove that you’re smart, but neither does slow recall.
Part of Americans’ view of ourselves is the sense that we’re somehow different from other countries and peoples, even from those who are our own immediate ancestors. From the days of John Winthrop we have claimed that we are exceptional, even if many of us do not still have a literal belief that God has chosen us for special favor as a people.
While the days of nineteenth-century discussions of “national character” have gone the way of eugenics (and for much the same reason) it is possible to talk about differences between cultures, with “culture” taken to signify incompletely overlapping bell curves of behavior and belief in different populations, marked by language, geography, self-identification and the like.
We’ve all experienced the reality of this state of affairs, even in the face of increasing globalization, when traveling to a new cultural environment. Compared to many other people on this earth, Americans talk too loudly, take up too much space even when just walking down the street, prefer quantity to quality in food, and tend to try to settle too many problems by the application of money. Not every American, not all the time, but a lot of us and a lot of the time. The French hold their elbows strangely close to their bodies; Italians wave their arms around. There are films of former Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia of New York in which it is possible to tell whether he is speaking English, Italian, or Yiddish solely by the way he uses his arms and hands.
Perhaps because we have continued to be a nation of immigrants, the US has a low-context, information-sharing culture, quite different from that of England or Japan, two nations whose customs and attitudes often puzzle American travelers. We are not offended if a newspaper editorial compares someone to “George Washington, the first President of the United States,” while English newspapers do not explain to their readers who Winston Churchill or Charles the First were, because English people ought to know such things and are insulted to be talked to as if they did not know. Americans assume that some people may not know, and take no offense. Americans ask for information, and other Americans freely give them that information, without asking “Why do you want to know?”
Shows such as Jeopardy! Wheel of Fortune, and The Price Is Right spread information freely and reward those who have information and share it by playing the game well. They are low-context and information-sharing. These long-running game shows, and particularly Jeopardy!, are representative of several of the beliefs and attitudes that are central to Americans’ understanding of their own character. They are indicators of many of the things that for Americans constitute living the best life. They constitute an index of cultural beliefs and activities which identify some of the deep differences between American culture and that of even our nearest cultural neighbors in Europe—the ways that we are, in fact, exceptional.