Professional wrestling

From the days of the first black-and-white sets, Professional Wrestling has been a staple of television programming, drawing interest from viewers who can't bear the idea of some noise not drowning out the demons that torment their brains. These days, professional wrestling continues to have a promiennt place in TV lineups, both on cable and on penny-ante networks that aspire to the ratings of CSPAN12.
Televised wrestling suffered a serious setback to its popularity during the "Pro Wrestling" scandals of the 1950s, in which Congressional hearings revealed that the outcome of matches were pre-determined. The scandal came to light after Herbert Stimpel, a former heavyweight champion from Brooklyn, alleged that he was ordered by the show's producers to throw a title match to the much more popular grappler, Charles Van Doren (The Columbia Crippler).
Despite the scandal, professional wrestling remained on the airwaves, even through the steroids scandal of the 1970s, in which it was discovered that some wrestlers were not taking steroids. After a mandatory ingestion program caused the average wrestler to swell up to five times the size of a normal human, wrestling was back in a big way, becoming a mainstay of pay-per-view broadcasts, cable shows, and NBC whenever Dick Ebersol lost an arm-wrestling contest to Vince McMahon.