Dotto
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Dotto (1957–1958) was an American television quiz show whose nine-month jump to the top of the daytime quiz show heap ended when it became the unexpected first casualty of what became the quiz show scandals.
Dotto was based on the children's connect-the-dots game: contestants answered general-interest questions to connect dots that made a portrait of a famous or historical personage. In a very brief period it became the highest-rated quiz program of 1958, with a weekly nighttime version launched on a competing network (NBC) in the summer of that year. Its host, Jack Narz, achieved a Q-rating (recognizability) equal if not slightly superior to that enjoyed by Hal March, the popular host of The $64,000 Question. But barely nine months after the show was born, executives at CBS and the show's sponsor, Colgate-Palmolive, confirmed what was first only suspected: Dotto, the highest-rated quiz show of 1958, had been fixed.
In May 1958, a notebook belonging to contestant (and later journalist) Marie Winn was found by another contestant, Ed Hilgemeier, who discovered the notebook included questions and answers to be used during Winn's appearances. A CBS executive vice president, Thomas Fisher, tested kinescopes of the show against Winn's notebook and concluded the show looked fixed. The executives also learned the show's producers had paid Winn, Hilgemeier, and Winn's opponent Yaffe Kimball-Slatin to keep quiet about the notebook. But they also learned that Hilgemeier may have demanded more money to keep quiet and filed a deceptive practices complaint with the Federal Communications Commission.
When the executives (including CBS president Frank Stanton) met in mid-August 1958, at the time a nighttime version of Dotto began to look like an NBC hit, executive producer Frank Cooper admitted Dotto had been rigged---and that only a select few among his production staffers knew it as well. (Narz didn't know of the rigging; he later passed a polygraph test while testifying to a grand jury investigating quiz show fixing.) The Colgate and CBS executives agreed: Dotto had to be and was cancelled. NBC followed suit regarding the nighttime version. And ten days later, newspaper stories exploded with newly-corroborated details provided by deposed Twenty One champion Herb Stempel that that show, too, had been fixed. The quiz show scandal was born in full form.
Some articles about the quiz show scandals have suggested an updated version of Dotto was planned for a 2000 premiere, but the new show never materialized. One contestant on the original Dotto, Connie Hines, who was coached for her appearance but not given questions or answers, later became familiar to television viewers as Wilbur Post's frustrated but loving wife, on the situation comedy Mister Ed.
A version of the show was also hugely successful in the United Kingdom, where it was broadcast on ITV from 1958 to 1960. The British hosts were (in order) Robert Gladwell, Jimmy Handley and Shaw Taylor.
[edit] Episode Status
There are two episodes (one daytime and one nighttime; the latter featuring the aforementioned Connie Hines) that have survived.
[edit] References
- Joseph Stone with Tim Yohn, Prime Time and Misdemeanors (New Jersey: Rutgers University Press)
- Robert Metz, CBS: Reflections in a Bloodshot Eye (Chicago: Playboy Press, 1975)
