ABSTRACT
Quiz shows’ attraction for producers and distributors cannot account for their popularity with viewers. This chapter concentrates on their role in the popular culture of the viewer, and explores the seeming paradox that a popular cultural commodity can serve the interests of both its producers and consumers, even when these interests contradict each other, as, necessarily, they will. For Bakhtin carnival was a licensed moment of freedom from the control of everyday life, when repressed pleasures could be enjoyed to excess and when normal social relations were temporarily inverted. The dominant ideology teaches us that money works socially to reward and encourage talent and hard work: quiz shows demonstrate the opposing ‘truth’, that the social distribution of money is a prime means of exerting social control. Quiz shows are thus in touch with everyday life, where lack of money is not understood in terms of lack of talent or hard work, but rather in terms of lack of power.
