4 Stars!

Rating: 10/10 (30 April 2004)

Quiz Show is a really thought-provoking and engaging period piece about a TV show scandal from the 50s. Rob Morrow plays Dick Godwin, an investigator for a congressional subcommittee, that reads an article in the paper that grabs his attention about a closed-door judicial hearing about a show he enjoys watching. Looking for a good challenge, Godwin decides to investigate the case and see if he can take the famous quiz show "21" down.
Morrow is aided by a show's former contestant Herbie Stemple, played by John Turturo, a blue-collar Jew trying to make ends meet and is enraged, both by the fact that his 15 minutes of fame are up, and also by the fact that the producers of the show made him take a "dive" when his ratings were up. Godwin is eager to go along with Stemple until the ex-contestant claims that the show's current reigning champion, Ivy League college professor Charles Van Doren is cheating. Morrow, a Harvard graduate himself, has befriended Van Doren in his investigation and starts to ask himself what's really going on? The beauty of the movie is that we're asking ourselves that question as well too, as the script cleverly keeps some of the secrets from us until a little later in the movie.

The movie's moral frame interestingly rests on Morrow's character Godwin, who clearly has a better sense of right and wrong than anyone else in the movie, yet isn't quite sure what to do with them. When someone asks him, `If someone offered you thousands of dollars to appear on TV and cheat on some questions, and no one would ever know, would you do it?' Godwin unflinchingly says he wouldn't without a second of hesitation. The movie's suspense comes from Godwin's search for clues, but there's an anticlimax here because he solves the puzzle but when it's all over, he finds himself looking back and wondering if his efforts really changed anything within the system. Herbie Stemple has a similar anticlimactic moment as well.

This film is one of my favorites just because of the overall attention to detail. A lot of the suspense and drama is cleverly drawn out and the sets have an authentic 50s feel. More than anything else, I think the characters are really just engaging and that just helps keep us gripped on the drama. For example, Charles Van Doren seemed to me a creation that goes against so many Hollywood stereotypes. Most good looking guys in movies have girls with them, but Charles Van Doren never really had a love interest in this movie, except for a couple fractions of scenes where he's taking out a girl, most of the time he talks about how too many girls crowd around him. He also seems to like and admire his dad more than most adult sons do, at least as seen on screen. Those characteristics of Charles Van Doren struck out at me, especially because of his eagerness to befriend Godwin more than he really need to if he was doing it entirely for ulterior motives.