Reruns of this series on GSN work well as entertainment, but people are overstating its historical value. Where are historical figures like Hubert Humphrey, Lyndon Johnson, J. Edgar Hoover, Martin Luther King, Clare Booth Luce, Rachel Carson, Beryl Markham, etc. ?
Out of 800 - some surviving black & white episodes, you get the rare treat of seeing Eleanor Roosevelt, Frank Lloyd Wright, Carl Sandburg and Herman Wouk. Wouk, an Orthodox Jew, looks uncomfortable sitting on the panel in 1956 when the contestant turns out to be somebody who "boxes kangaroos" for a living. He never appeared on What's My Line again.
Besides Wouk, another intelligent person who did What's My Line and possibly no other TV show comes to mind: U.S. Senator George Smathers. Then I found him on a dumbed - down 1985 BBC documentary / amazon.com product "Marilyn Monroe: Say Goodbye To The President." Oh well, easy come easy go.
I'd love to talk more about Eleanor, Frank and Carl, but everybody in the Yahoo and Google discussion groups wants to talk instead about the movie stars and the goofballs who make nail polish for dogs.
Don't get me wrong, I love most of the banter between Bennett Cerf and John Daly. Arlene Francis gives people a cheery lift. The tension between John and Dorothy Kilgallen is fascinating when she tries to break through his filibuster. Maybe the tension between those two was so essential to the show's success that her death made the show fail.
If a schoolteacher wants to screen What's My Line for her social studies students, that's fine. It's okay as long as he / she chooses just a few episodes -- the right ones.
So many baby boomers are saying online that they recall fondly getting permission to stay awake until 11:00 Sunday nights for this show as long as their homework was done. What they forget is that the primitive technology of the 1950s / 1960s forced them to take What's My Line in small doses. It worked great as a little icing on the cake of their Sputnik - inspired competitive education.
But too much icing is bad. These days if you Tivo, say, 25 episodes and watch them back to back, you get the false impression that the Manhattan sophisticates of yesteryear were obsessed with celebrities and movie stars. Wrong. It just seems that way when your need for sleep at 3:30 in the morning (when GSN shows reruns) makes you depend totally on Tivo. Then you have other commitments that make you catch up on several episodes at a time. Then you go to the grocery store check - out line and you might think that What's My Line was a precursor to all those horrible magazines. Something like what Benjamin Bradlee (1970s Washington Post editor) calls "the birth of celebrity culture." Please don't do that to What's My Line.
TODAY people are obsessed with celebrities. But New Yorkers and their followers were NOT in the 1950s / 1960s. They knew how to read books written by serious writers, NOT Kitty Kelley. Watching What's My Line in that era hardly put a dent in that reading. Today if you overload your Tivo you can dumb down your life. Don't just listen to Bennett joke about the Tilton School in New Hampshire. Learn a little of what the Tilton boys learn. Read the nice things Gertrude Stein said about Bennett even though he couldn't understand a word she wrote. Can you?
The mystery guest round was a little icing on the cake once a week. That person was sometimes called the "mystery celebrity," but celebrities hardly mattered to Dorothy, Arlene, Bennett or John.
Dorothy Kilgallen didn't make her gossip a priority; she was really a crime reporter. Arlene Francis acted on Broadway, which was then considered high - brow sophisticated culture. During World War II she played the part of a Russian woman who could fire a rifle very well. Can you imagine Vanna White doing such a thing today ? Bennett Cerf published Faulkner, for heaven's sake. Please don't remember him totally for his zealous questioning of the mystery guests. He was just being competitive; he knew the TV western "Rifleman" wasn't something kids should study in school. Even the star of that western, Chuck Connors, sat on the What's My Line panel and proved that Reading Is Fundamental.
Franklin Heller was the director of What's My Line. Don't confuse his job with Mike Nichols' job. A TV director of a quiz show broadcast live is a technician who switches cameras at precisely the right moments during the live feed. Then consider what job Mr. Heller took on after CBS axed the show in 1967: literary agent.
Please don't remember John Daly for narrating an episode of Green Acres. That's the treatment he gets in online discussion groups.
Please don't dumb down these high achievers in the era BEFORE "The Closing of the American Mind" (title of a 1987 best - selling book). Just enjoy these black & white reruns for what they are: evidence of a witty game that entertained people for 27 minutes each week.
Then improve your reading, especially if you have kids. Sputnik doesn't matter today, but look at what Buddhist and Islamic countries are doing to us. Their people immigrate here and the kids do better in school than kids named John Smith. Johnny can't read very well, but Lu Ping Zhu can discuss Confucius AND Ray Bradbury AND Stephen King. And people wonder why "What's My Maginot Line?" can't get on television today ...
Out of 800 - some surviving black & white episodes, you get the rare treat of seeing Eleanor Roosevelt, Frank Lloyd Wright, Carl Sandburg and Herman Wouk. Wouk, an Orthodox Jew, looks uncomfortable sitting on the panel in 1956 when the contestant turns out to be somebody who "boxes kangaroos" for a living. He never appeared on What's My Line again.
Besides Wouk, another intelligent person who did What's My Line and possibly no other TV show comes to mind: U.S. Senator George Smathers. Then I found him on a dumbed - down 1985 BBC documentary / amazon.com product "Marilyn Monroe: Say Goodbye To The President." Oh well, easy come easy go.
I'd love to talk more about Eleanor, Frank and Carl, but everybody in the Yahoo and Google discussion groups wants to talk instead about the movie stars and the goofballs who make nail polish for dogs.
Don't get me wrong, I love most of the banter between Bennett Cerf and John Daly. Arlene Francis gives people a cheery lift. The tension between John and Dorothy Kilgallen is fascinating when she tries to break through his filibuster. Maybe the tension between those two was so essential to the show's success that her death made the show fail.
If a schoolteacher wants to screen What's My Line for her social studies students, that's fine. It's okay as long as he / she chooses just a few episodes -- the right ones.
So many baby boomers are saying online that they recall fondly getting permission to stay awake until 11:00 Sunday nights for this show as long as their homework was done. What they forget is that the primitive technology of the 1950s / 1960s forced them to take What's My Line in small doses. It worked great as a little icing on the cake of their Sputnik - inspired competitive education.
But too much icing is bad. These days if you Tivo, say, 25 episodes and watch them back to back, you get the false impression that the Manhattan sophisticates of yesteryear were obsessed with celebrities and movie stars. Wrong. It just seems that way when your need for sleep at 3:30 in the morning (when GSN shows reruns) makes you depend totally on Tivo. Then you have other commitments that make you catch up on several episodes at a time. Then you go to the grocery store check - out line and you might think that What's My Line was a precursor to all those horrible magazines. Something like what Benjamin Bradlee (1970s Washington Post editor) calls "the birth of celebrity culture." Please don't do that to What's My Line.
TODAY people are obsessed with celebrities. But New Yorkers and their followers were NOT in the 1950s / 1960s. They knew how to read books written by serious writers, NOT Kitty Kelley. Watching What's My Line in that era hardly put a dent in that reading. Today if you overload your Tivo you can dumb down your life. Don't just listen to Bennett joke about the Tilton School in New Hampshire. Learn a little of what the Tilton boys learn. Read the nice things Gertrude Stein said about Bennett even though he couldn't understand a word she wrote. Can you?
The mystery guest round was a little icing on the cake once a week. That person was sometimes called the "mystery celebrity," but celebrities hardly mattered to Dorothy, Arlene, Bennett or John.
Dorothy Kilgallen didn't make her gossip a priority; she was really a crime reporter. Arlene Francis acted on Broadway, which was then considered high - brow sophisticated culture. During World War II she played the part of a Russian woman who could fire a rifle very well. Can you imagine Vanna White doing such a thing today ? Bennett Cerf published Faulkner, for heaven's sake. Please don't remember him totally for his zealous questioning of the mystery guests. He was just being competitive; he knew the TV western "Rifleman" wasn't something kids should study in school. Even the star of that western, Chuck Connors, sat on the What's My Line panel and proved that Reading Is Fundamental.
Franklin Heller was the director of What's My Line. Don't confuse his job with Mike Nichols' job. A TV director of a quiz show broadcast live is a technician who switches cameras at precisely the right moments during the live feed. Then consider what job Mr. Heller took on after CBS axed the show in 1967: literary agent.
Please don't remember John Daly for narrating an episode of Green Acres. That's the treatment he gets in online discussion groups.
Please don't dumb down these high achievers in the era BEFORE "The Closing of the American Mind" (title of a 1987 best - selling book). Just enjoy these black & white reruns for what they are: evidence of a witty game that entertained people for 27 minutes each week.
Then improve your reading, especially if you have kids. Sputnik doesn't matter today, but look at what Buddhist and Islamic countries are doing to us. Their people immigrate here and the kids do better in school than kids named John Smith. Johnny can't read very well, but Lu Ping Zhu can discuss Confucius AND Ray Bradbury AND Stephen King. And people wonder why "What's My Maginot Line?" can't get on television today ...