2
formerly known as
quiz shows was renamed game shows in the years following the scandals. The new
name,
game shows, removes the genre from the realm of serious knowledge and cultural centrality and
instead creates associations with play and leisure time which connect it to less sensitive cultural areas.
1
While the
quiz vs. game distinction is indeed an important strategy for the broadcast industry in the wake
of the scandals, it does not necessarily imply a clear, long-term shift in the style or content of quiz/game
shows. As the recent popularity of
Who Wants to be a Millionaire illustrates, quiz shows once again
incorporate knowledge-based questions and are featured prominently on prime-time television. In the
case of
Who Wants to be a Millionaire even the generic label quiz show has been recycled. I argue that
these shifting generic distinctions are an important site for the analysis of the discursive struggles over
program control, cultural hierarchies and social acceptance in the broadcast industry. Despite the
historical conflicts over the use of the terms
quiz and game, I will keep the term quiz shows for practical
purposes, denoting an overarching, descriptive term for the genre as a whole.
The case of the missing corpus
One of the basic concerns of genre criticism and genre theory has been the identification of a
body of texts and the study of its organization according to common characteristics. As Altman points out
in The American Film Musical, genre theory (e.g. Todorov, 1975) has often differentiated between
historical and theoretical genres.
2
It is assumed that a historical genre describes the cultural practice of
encoding and decoding genre texts without any a priori theoretical assumptions about the genre.
However, the constitution of a genre requires that certain (theoretical) assumptions about commonalities
between texts be made. This observation holds true for media practitioners as well as genre theorists–
each group attempts to understand a genre based on an implicitly theoretical understanding of it. Thus,
historical genres are always also theoretical ones. In reverse, the observation of a theoretical genre
always relates to the reading practices of the audience or the critic, who is also historically situated and
who is also part of an audience. Consequently, the history-theory split ultimately only masks the
subjectivity of the researcher and the theoretical basis of all 'historical' genres.
Suggesting a synthesis of these two views, Altman suggests that the historical definition of the
Convention