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The new champion was a teacher from Columbia named Charles Van Doren. Over the course of the next three months he defeated all opponents through a combination of knowing what questions he was going to get and being told the answers to all of them. The piece of trash probably couldn't look his family in the eye when he got home, but his winnings totaled $140,000, and in 1956, that was enough money to have his family's eyes replaced with Vanilla Coke dispensers.

Herb came forward to tell the world that the show was fixed, and no one believed him. After all, why would someone fix a trivia game show? Without the competition, it would be a pointlessly treacherous way to trick the world into watching an idiot state uninteresting facts. Yes, I know I just described YouTube which should show you how impossible this concept would have been for a 1950s person to grasp.

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It turns out that Twenty One was fixed almost from the beginning. They made the decision to sometimes "help" their contestants after their first episode featured two morons getting every question wrong. With dozens of people involved, they had to know that their dark secret had a ridiculously short lifespan. Still, they figured Fake Quiz Show would outlast The Dipshits Who Don't Know The Answers Show. When you give someone the option of stupid or evil, most of them are going to go with evil.

Their plot went undetected for another year since at the time most of the world was looking for communists. Then a contestant on a similar quiz show, Dotto, was caught with a notebook containing all the answers. Once the world realized that this kind of sleaziness was possible, Twenty One was busted almost the same day. The scandal nearly destroyed the game show industry, inspired a Robert Redford movie, and forced Congress to amend the Communications Act to make it illegal to fix quiz shows. You know you've invented an absurd new way to be terrible when the government has to step in and make a law against it. Think about this: If you were elbow deep in a horse while you caught a man cheating on a game show, in most states the police would arrest him, shake your free hand and thank you for your vigilance. And the horse would be given a medal.