They hadn’t all died at once. That had been the thing about it. Perhaps if they had, it would have been much easier to spot it in the first place. Historians of the singular event are able to trace it back now to the sudden death of actor Thad Chadderton as he had been the very first to go. Chadderton, a sort of fixture of 1970’s era low budget horror films, had found significantly more fame later as the master of ceremonies for the wildly popular game show “What’s My Signal?” The basic premise of “Signal?” had been rather simple, as most successful game shows typically are, but it had been in the unusual way that the show had been executed that had made it so absorbing to watch, even in prime time, where it had resided every Thursday night for four straight years until its untimely death in 1984. Contestants of “Signal?” had been chosen directly from the studio audience and made to guess at the name of some historical event or personage through the use of ever obscuring clues or “signals” that had been displayed onto a large screen that hung suspended just behind Chadderton’s head from his place on the raised dais. For example, should the correct answer to the puzzle have been the name “Nikola Tesla”, the first signal given to the contestant might have been merely a short, soundless clip of one of his coils in action, the second perhaps a grainy photograph of Thomas Edison looking forlorn with the sounds of pitched battle, archived from one of the wars, being played behind the image as a sort of accompanying soundtrack, and the third perhaps only a single shot of a newspaper headline of the Tunguska event and that in Russian, mind you. By the time the contest had reached its fourth round, the clue might have been simply random images of the town of Colorado Springs, Colorado itself and of its surrounding environs with perhaps nothing at all, no signage per se, to officially identify the images as such. And so on. The film editors and the sound engineers who had worked on “Signal?” had been among the very best in the business, and the show itself had quickly gained quite a reputation in the industry as one of the very best places to work, not only because of the sheer, sadistic glee inherent in trying to stump one’s fellow man (and at “Signal?” this had become elevated to a work of art, let me tell you), but also because of the general creative freedom that had been given to its technicians in order to perform said stumping. That is, once they had shown a working aptitude for the basic nature of the game (contestant guesses correctly, we give them money etc) and had also proven to their superiors beyond a shadow of a doubt that they too understood the finer points of the endeavor, the show’s general overarching philosophy (we don’t give away money here) as well. But the truth was that these prerequisites had become mostly unnecessary as the show had entered its second season. After its initial broadcast run of twenty six episodes, “What’s My Signal?” had then kept its entire staff on board for the duration of the series, mostly due to the fact that no one at all had wanted to go anywhere else. But so the point of the game and how to play it was that if the contestant had given an answer to the question after the first given signal, right or wrong, then the game would be over and the contestant would then take home their winnings and/or the perfunctory consolation prize, which of course was provided free of charge by the advertisers, with a small promotional consideration having been paid by the same. If, however, the contestant had declined to answer the question, or to even offer his or her best guess at it in the allotted sixty seconds that they were given to do so (and of course there was no obligation here to say anything at all), then this maneuver was called a “pass” and it could be used at any point during the game simply by speaking the word aloud. Then the contest would move onto the next round, where the identity of the same thing would still be in question. All in all, the program was a clear derivative, as most game shows are, derivatives that is, of earlier fare like “Password” and “What’s My Line?” with the hysterical swoon and audience participation bit of later shows like “Let’s Make A Deal” and “The Price Is Right” thrown in for good measure. The real genius of “Signal?” however, was that it had been one of the first televised shows to make use of what researchers of this sort of thing would later term The Stagger Effect, which was, economically speaking, a fairly fancy way of saying that the house always wins, but what it really meant for the contestants was that as the show went on and the clues/signals got progressively harder, and then more archaic and inscrutable as well, the more the cash value of the prize itself went up. In the Tesla example, for instance, if the contestant had guessed the answer after the very first signal, if he or she had actually come out and said “Nikola Tesla” (or more likely, “Nikolai”, but who’s counting?) they would have then won exactly one dollar and the game would have been over. But had they waited until the fifth or the sixth round to give the correct answer, then the cash prize would have been significantly higher since it increased exponentially after each round, from one dollar to ten to a hundred then a thousand and so on, up until the sixth round, where the grand prize for giving the correct response had been one hundred thousand dollars. The promise of this hefty payday, higher than that of any other regularly televised game show to that point, had of course been one of the things that had made the show so terribly compelling in the first place, since no one in their right mind would ever walk away after the first round in a game such as this and if they did, it was then just a matter of moving onto the next contestant. Those that did walk away in one of the earlier rounds, and these people were few and far between, were generally thought of as weak somehow and were chided gently by Chadderton and sort of goaded on into continuing as well, by a variety of factors, and if they did not, if they did not choose to continue, they were then made to walk off stage to a rather displeasing and somewhat drawn out “wah-waaaah” sound and were generally tittered at mercilessly by the studio audience and then sort of more openly and ruthlessly mocked by the American viewing public, said mocking always seeming easier to do from the confines of one’s own home for some reason. These Nervous Nellies, some of them quite obviously only appearing on camera in some sort of desperate bid for attention, later gave rise to another separate phenomenon known as the Jersey Housewife Effect; of which we shan’t go into any further detail about here.

What is fair to say now is that the secret weapon of “What’s My Signal?” (and of The Stagger Effect in general) was the way that it had played on the very egos of its contestants, on the lazy and naturally occurring greed of any one person who would consent to appear on a game show in the first place, however benign that greed might appear on the surface. There was peer pressure here to contend with, of course, and adrenaline and fear and self-doubt, but mostly it was the ego that was being toyed with. The majority of the contestants followed the game into at least the fourth round, whether they knew the answer or not, with an overwhelming 79 percent of all contestants ever appearing on “Signal?” taking the game into its sixth and final round. Because, you know, who wanted to just win a hundred bucks here? These people were here for the big money and the big money only; that had been the whole point of coming after all. But interestingly (and rather amusingly, one feels in retrospect), not one person in the entire history of the program had ever won its grand prize, had never claimed the one hundred thousand dollars. This is what had ultimately led to the show’s demise, as well as a rather punitive fine from the Federal Communications Commission against the show’s producers after “Signal?” had ended, citing them for their “utter lack” of concern over the “unique emotional distress” that they had helped to “exacerbate” in the psyches of the American viewing public, stopping just short of holding them personally responsible for inflicting actual emotional damage here, on its viewers and on its contestants. They didn’t actually use the word “psyche” here, but you get the general idea. The only reason that they hadn’t carried the charge to its logical conclusion and filed an actual criminal complaint against the show was that even the FCC knew as well as anyone that Barnum’s old adage, while positively attributable to no one, still rang incredibly true here (you know, the one about suckers and minutes) and that this adage was especially true in the world of televised broadcasting and particular in the highly specialized arena of game shows. The legal team for the producers of “Signal?” had already prepared quite a lengthy defense on behalf of its client, taking depositions from the country’s leading authorities on Freudian and child psychology as well as from experts in the fields of mass communications and socialized behavior, the psychology of crowds and that sort of thing, and going so far at one point as to cite Chicagoland’s beloved Bozo the Clown program as perhaps defining a perfectly reasonable legal precedent here. All of this had remained unnecessary of course, since an actual case had never been brought, and the fine had been a pittance anyway compared to the thousands of dollars in advertising revenue that the show had racked up over its forty eight months on the air (of which ad revenues had also increased exponentially at the show went on, by the way) and sort of chillingly besides, the strange fact was certainly not lost on the powers that be at the FCC that not one person in the history of the show, not one, contestant or otherwise, had ever complained of feeling taken advantage of by “Signal?”, nor had anyone ever filed a single formal complaint against it. In fact, it was supposed by many in the business that the only reason the FCC had levied the fine in the first place was because they were under pressure to do so from rival production companies as well as by lobbyists from the two other major American networks currently not broadcasting “Signal?” (the other networks also not being happy with their inability to hire anyone away from the show’s production team with even an elementary understanding of the show’s nuanced secrets, I’m happy to report) and the FCC for their part had been pretty much tired of listening to the entire petty matter at this point anyway and so had issued the edict against “Signal” as sort of a warning call against these types of shows being produced in the future. For the thing of it was, despite the awfully high percentage of contestants entering the final round and winning absolutely NOTHING, no one that had ever been actively involved in truly watching the show each week or in competing on it as a contestant had ever uttered one peep about it being unfair at all. It was as if they didn’t notice it, this strange fact that the almost overwhelmingly titillating grand prize of ONE HUNDRED THOUSAND DOLLARS, announced loudly at the beginning of each episode, had never actually been won by anyone. “Signal?” gave away a thousand dollars maybe once every couple of weeks or so fairly regularly and then once about every six, someone would be lucky or smart enough to take home the 10K. This had seemed a fair enough deal to the American people, it was decided in retrospect; it had seemed to them just fine and this general goodwill towards “Signal?” and to its makers had perhaps been aggravated by the fact that the show was only broadcast once a week anyway. Who had time to complain about anything that was like only one half hour of their lives? External market research conducted after the show had ended by the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences suggested that for the average viewer, the general impression had been that the show was pretty hard to begin with, deceptively so really, that it was very much a rather astoundingly difficult game when you got right down to it and that many had felt vicariously smarter just by watching the damn thing and perhaps learning a thing or two in the process. But no one had really ever expected anyone to truly win at it, except for of course at that exact moment when a fresh contestant was standing on stage and then you had rooted for them all over again (and against the darker nature of the show, most researchers had surmised), much in the way one might for an undersized challenger taking on an opponent over twice his size, taking one for the team, as it were. When asked by researchers if this had not seemed unfair to them, in the way that the game was setup to overwhelmingly favor the show’s producers, most had either scratched their heads and claimed that, huh, they had never thought about it that way or else they had just shook their heads very slightly no and had given the researchers this sort of ghastly sly smile. So.

In any case, it had been decided that this was probably another one of the reasons why so many people had kept watching “Signal?” every week, even with the lack of an obvious big payoff. It had sort of played on their hope (the ones whom still possessed hope anyway), and it had been their hope against hope really, in the face of nearly insurmountable odds each and every week. In this, the example of Tesla is probably not fairly representational of what went on over there exactly. A more likely scenario would be one in which the answer would have been something like “jelly doughnut” and the first signal broadcast would have been something sort of obvious, like footage perhaps of Kennedy’s famed Berlin speech, but with the infamous (and incorrectly translated) line excised, and then descend into utter non sequiturs shortly thereafter, unless, of course, you were already in possession of the answer, unless you were firmly in on the joke. Stock footage of flies buzzing around fresh strawberries, for instance, the Officer Krupke piece from West Side Story, that sort of thing. It wasn’t just that the show was hard; it was that it was almost cynically so and then also sort of mean at the same time, the correct answer having been displayed not only on the bottom of the screen for the home viewers but also on two oversized monitors that had faced the studio audience the entire time. This would perhaps be as good a point as any to also make mention of the unique studio situation that had been in place for the filming of all of the “What’s My Signal?” episodes. Thad Chadderton, as host of the program, would come out at the beginning of each show in his immaculately pressed three piece suit and impeccably clipped faux British accent (which had been entirely for show from the beginning, mind you, even in his horror film days as a sort of knock-off Vincent Price, Chadderton having grown up partly on an Royal Air Force base in Suffolk, England, but mostly in and around the storm ravaged community of Xenia, Ohio, from which his kith and kin had primarily hailed) and he would give this like short little (and also somewhat anachronistic) monologue on the incredible importance of history in our daily lives and how keeping up with current events made you that much more of a well-rounded person and that you lovely people watching at home right now, especially all of you wonderful schoolchildren, should definitely take it upon yourselves to read at least one newspaper a day if you could, not only because it was the smart and cultured thing to do, but also because you never knew, you too might someday be lucky enough to also be a contestant on “What’s…My…Signal?”, these last three words being delivered with these three little like tally-ho punches by Chadderton that had punctuated the air, followed by a re-cueing of the show’s jaunty and much remembered (according to the ATAS research) theme song. It was all very wholesome and good natured and hadn’t seemed pompous at all to anyone, that is, until all of the lights had gone out over the heads of that day’s studio audience. Because the real beauty of “Signal?”, you see, the real, real mocking genius of the whole thing had rested in the simple fact that its entire studio audience remained seated behind soundproof glass, thickly double paned, as the show was being filmed. Six contestants were chosen at random before filming began (which had been mathematically calculated with all certainty as the fewest number needed for a half hour program with three commercial breaks in it, should all of them decide to leave after only one round and take their measly, crummy dollar with them), and were made to wait backstage as the show progressed. The audience, having full visual and broadcast audio of what was transpiring before them and sitting in the rough equivalent of a large surgery theatre (except completely soundproofed, of course), were not permitted to bang on the glass whatsoever (and the three burly security guards standing in the darkened lower left corner of the theatre certainly cast a pall on thinking about THAT), and nor was the contestant permitted to turn around to try to look for answers from the soundless faces literally screaming at them from just sixty feet behind. This would result in an instant disqualification of the contestant and Chadderton moving onto the next, a rule that Chadderton had never failed to repeat, idly but in no uncertain terms, at the beginning of every episode in his clipped and slightly stentorian tone. To ask for anything less from the quiz master and from the game itself would have been not only unethical but perhaps also highly uncivilized as well. Come, come now. Oh, this had been a good show, “Signal?” had, and it had been a dark show as well, a show that had worked. So much so in fact that the show had continued in syndication well into the early nineties, being broadcast irregularly and un-ironically on various stand alone cable outlets throughout the Midwest as well as some more tongue in cheek rebroadcasts of the thing into some of the upper provinces of Canada and then later into Great Britain as well, where Chadderton was already something of an underground folk hero and where “Signal?” itself became an instant cult classic, particularly among art students and other assorted young intelligentsia. It wasn’t until over twenty five years later that the show itself would be implicated in Chadderton’s death, and then not because of its content, but by simply even existing at all.