[quote name=\'mmb5\' post=\'244380\' date=\'Jul 17 2010, 06:39 PM\']Is it now a cultural thing reflected in game shows that in order to fail you have to fail repeatedly? 50s shows with money trees, no second chances. If you were wrong -- you lost. Everything. In school -- you failed -- no social promotion.
Nowadays -- second chances, panic buttons, helps and safety zones. Real life -- social promotion, "it's society's fault" and repeated extra chances.
Another difference: Early shows -- primarily female adults as contestants, commercials were targeted towards adults. Nowadays -- contestants <35, because advertisers want them and nobody else.[/quote]
Several points of order...
First, the "need to fail repeatedly" is something that can be found in some of the 1950s (and, counting radio, earlier) game show. "Break The Bank" allowed one false answer, "Big Surprise" losing contestants (IIRC) kept a percentage of their winnings, the preliminary rounds of "Name That Tune" were heavily coached, the pay scale on "Two For The Money" made it difficult to go home with nothing, and contestants on "You Bet Your Life" were guaranteed (if memory serves) $25.
Which leads to the second point: What sort of game shows are we considering in this discussion? The issue at hand is that the "contestant versus the house" model used by most current game shows is one that was fairly dormant in the United States between the 1950s and the late 1990s. Can anyone here name a program of that nature that had a significant amount of success in the interval? The gap in time is significant, as it makes a discussion of the evolution of that style difficult, compared with, say, the "contestants versus one another" style of gameplay.
Third, I find connecting this to trends in society suspect, in part because some of the comparisons aren't as abject as this would suggest (for instance, the "society's fault" style of criminology dates to the early twentieth century, and I've seen references to social promotion in the 1930s). Shifts in society certainly are demonstrated with game shows, but care must be taken, as it can be too easy to use a few unrepresentative examples to make a point.
Fourth, to bring up the elephant in the room, game show producers (and program sponsors) of the 1950s didn't want their programs to become a half-hour of failures. Is the surface probability of failure negated at all by the fact that many of the programs in question were, by various means, offering "invisible" assistance?
Finally, to address the last quoted paragraph, while a full answer to this question is impossible (I doubt we could recover everyone who was ever a contestant on any game show in the United States), a viewing of a large representative sample seems to suggest that game show contestants were equally male and female (or, if anything, skewing slightly male) during the prime-time era, and that the "female shift" is connected to the genre's move to daytime programming. Anyone want to do the statistical survey needed to answer this question?
