Olaf Hoerschelmann

"The Quizzical Pleasure of Millionaire: Popularity and Hierarchies of Knowledge"

In this paper, I investigate contemporary quiz shows and Who Wants to be a Millionaire in particular as a site for the production of knowledge. This paper will adapt Fiske’s work on the politics of knowledge in quiz shows from Television Culture (1987) and other articles (Fiske 1990) and argues that the knowledge presented on Millionaire is both informed by social norms and hierarchies and is capable of shaping hierarchies of knowledge, education and taste itself (cf. Bourdieu, 1984, 1990).

While the program emphasizes the intellectual capabilities of its successful contestants, an analysis of the structure and content of questions on Millionaire reveals that the program employs a mixture of trivia and serious knowledge. Fiske (1987, p. 269) observes that knowledge in the game show genre is often categorized through a basic split between factual knowledge and human knowledge. He divides the genre further into 'academic' and everyday knowledge as subcategories of factual knowledge, and knowledge of people in general and of specific individuals as subcategory of human knowledge. I argue that one of the strategies that creates the popular appeal of Millionaire is the collapse of some of the categories that Fiske described in the context of 1980s game shows. Additionally, the use of lifelines and the use of a multiple-choice format makes the knowledge promoted on Millionaire accessible to a larger group of viewers. Millionaire tends to reward surface knowledge of a variety of familiar subjects. The types of knowledge endorsed on Millionaire imply that the program also tends to assume a middle-aged, married, white, Anglo consumer as the ideal contestant.

Following the writings of Giroux and others in the area of critical pedagogy, I conclude that Millionaire not only positions such knowledge as central to US culture, but it also produces a strong image of the normative subject that possesses such knowledge. In other words, Who Wants to be a Millionaire produces a powerful discourse of what counts as normal knowledge and normal education and of the people who are assumed to possess these attributes, while excluding knowledge at the margins of US social and educational hierarchies.