One of the more memorable episodes of the original Twilight Zone is "Mr. Dingle, The Strong". In it, a couple curious Martians grant a sad-sack salesman superhuman strength, if only as a social experiment. The titular Mr. Dingle quickly goes about abusing his new power and showing off for fun and profit. The Martians deem the entire human race incapable of handling such responsibility, but before they depart they fill Dingle's head with an encyclopedic intellect. The lesson of this episode of the traditionally moralistic show is that brains are better than brawn, even if they're less outwardly impressive. The evolution of the American game show went through a similar process, though it ultimately settled on a deceptively populist point of view, rather than completely embracing the elitism inherent to knowledge-for-money arrangements.

Some of the earliest game shows were quiz shows. This was a natural consequence of radio. When words are your primary medium, how else do you make a game? The program generally considered the first radio game show was Truth or Consequences, starting in 1940. The truth about ToC is that the questions were never really the point. They were designed to be either too difficult for most people or were jokes rather than actual tests. The whole point was to invoke the "consequences" for a wrong or slow answer, usually some kind of stunt or gag. The point of the show was to entertain, and in doing so ToC turned itself into a decidedly anti-intellectual program. It made fun of the very concept of knowledge.

Then came television and with television came Twenty-One. It first aired in 1956 and it's now more famous for being rigged than for being the first truly high-stakes quiz show. As the story goes, the first episode of Twenty-One was played straight and the contestants failed to answer most of the questions correctly. NBC had a real problem on its hands. It seemed that the American public wasn't reliably smart enough to answer the show's brain-busting questions. Rather than sink the show and lose its sponsors, NBC decided to script the whole thing. For a time Twenty-One was the #1 rated program on television thanks to its almost entirely fictional battle of knowledge between stereotypical intellectual "villain" Herbert Stemple and the clean-cut "hero" Charles van Doren. It took quite a long time for the real story to break, but the damage had already been done. As of the 1950's, quiz shows were still openly hostile to actual intelligence.

The key to making the quiz show format work was to make it accessible to average people, to democratize it half to death. Thus begot Merv Griffin the show we know and love as Jeopardy! Whereas Twenty-One got its thrills out of making minor celebrities of fake, scripted smarties, Jeopardy! decided to pull from the middle and make the questions easier. Still today the "answers" on the show are more about common knowledge than extraordinary intellect. The draw of Jeopardy! is that viewers can play along at home and not feel stupid. They can be rewarded for retaining a middle school education and having fast reflexes, all supported by the fantasy of being given large sums of money for their average know-how. The show has all the trappings of the perceptions of intelligence. It's dry, its humor has everything to do with mildly clever wordplay and its host (especially since 1984) has been effete and a bit stuffy. American quiz shows sell the aesthetics of intelligence but never really embrace true intellect. They're smart shows for not particularly smart people.