Twenty-One (game show)
television series
Twenty-One is an American game show originally hosted by Jack Barry that initially aired on NBC from September 12, 1956 to October 16, 1958. Produced by Jack Barry-Dan Enright Productions, the show featured two contestants playing against each other in separate isolation booths, answering general knowledge questions to earn 21 total points. The program became notorious when it was found to be rigged as part of the 1950s quiz show scandals, which nearly caused the demise of the entire genre in the wake of United States Senate investigations. The 1994 film Quiz Show is based on these events. A new version of the show aired on NBC and PAX from January 9 to May 28, 2000 with Maury Povich as host.
Gameplay
Two contestants, typically a returning champion and a challenger, entered separate isolation booths and donned pairs of headphones. The arrangement of the booths and the studio lighting prevented the contestants from seeing or hearing each other or the audience. At any given moment during the game, one booth would be "open", meaning that the occupant could hear the host in the headphones and could speak using the booth's microphone. The other booth would be "closed", with its microphone disabled and the headphones playing music to prevent the contestant from hearing the game. After each question, sounds of laughter and applause were played through the headphones of the contestant in the closed booth to prevent him or her from learning the outcome of the opponent's turn.
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Object files, edition statements, performance records and contemporary criticism preserve different stages of the work’s history. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 22, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q143493. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1956, 1958, 1994 and 2000.
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This entry incorporates text from “Twenty-One (game show)” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.