It’s Academic, which pits local teenagers against each other in a battle of wits for money, glory, and some degree of fame, isn’t your grandfather’s game show. Actually, maybe it is.
When Noah Chin of McLean High competed on the high school trivia program in March, it marked a major milestone: the first grandchild of a former contestant to compete on the show. Noah’s grandfather Allen Chin competed for Anacostia High back in 1967 and 1968. It’s Academic is the world’s longest continuously running television game show, according to Guinness World Records. Debuting on October 7, 1961, the show celebrates its 60th anniversary this month.
Asked if she could track down which schools competed in that inaugural episode, executive producer Susan Altman just laughs. “No! I doubt we have anything about that in our archives,” Altman answers, adding that there’s a very good reason the episode apparently was never recorded for posterity: “When the show first went on the air, people thought it would last for maybe a year or two.”
The First 50 years
In the late 1950s, Susan Altman’s mother, Sophie Altman, was working for a high school discussion show called Teen Talk. “Most kids who appeared on Teen Talk were outgoing and vivacious,” Susan explains, “but she also wanted to showcase those who might be quieter.” So Sophie had the idea to develop a show that could highlight the academic talents of teens as well.
That first season, she wrote all the trivia questions herself, with no internet to help. Taping and airing on the Washington, DC–area station WRC, better known to locals as NBC 4, the show developed a following. In the public’s mind, some of those old episodes still hold up. Against all odds, the most-viewed YouTube search result for It’s Academic is not a 21st-century episode, but rather a black-and-white October 6, 1963, match that has attained more than 18,000 views. What’s so special about that one is a bit of a mystery—it’s an interesting time capsule, sure, but so many of those other early games are, too.
The program’s popularity has likely been due in no small part to the show’s pep-rally atmosphere. In non-pandemic times, at least, a live studio audience cheers the nine contestants on (teams of three from three different high schools), including’ team mascots, cheerleading squads, pep bands, drumlines, and—very loudly in the 2018 championship—one person audibly banging a cowbell. In the early 1980s, one of the cheerleaders who appeared to root on Washington-Lee (now Washington-Liberty) High School was a teenage Sandra Bullock.
The show was also a hit due to gregarious presenter Mac McGarry, who hosted for a full half-century from that first episode through 2011, when he was 85. McGarry, who worked as an on-air personality for NBC 4, always put the attention on the students; in his final episode, he didn’t even deliver a farewell speech or monologue at the end. (McGarry died two years later, in 2013.)
Asked by The Washington Post to name some of his most memorable moments hosting the show through the decades, McGarry once mentioned a late-’60s contestant interview when he asked a student about his plans for the future. The young man replied that he planned to smoke a lot of weed. Improbably, the producers left the moment in.
Through the decades, the show has featured prerecorded questions and segments from some of the biggest names in American politics and culture. “It’s Academic offers a positive image of young people,” Ronald Reagan said in a 1985 episode, calling the program “a scholastic battle of wits, a showcase for bright young students, and a reminder of the importance of education.”
Other guest appearances through the years have included Supreme Court justices Clarence Thomas and Stephen Breyer, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, New York Times executive editor Dean Baquet, Baseball Hall of Famer Cal Ripken Jr., and Wonder Woman actress Lynda Carter.
The Past 10 Years
Hillary Howard, afternoon anchor for radio station WTOP (103.5 FM), took over hosting duties from McGarry in 2011. She openly acknowledges that many of the competitors are better at instant recall than she is. “I’m not so good at accessing information quickly,” Howard admits. “I’m more like, ‘Oh, I know that! I know that!’”
Howard loves the job, but one of the hardest parts is suppressing her parental instincts. “Once, on the final question of a match, a kid answered a millisecond before the buzzer. They missed it, their team lost, and they were visibly inconsolable. You want to wrap your arms around them and say, ‘It’s OK!’ But you can’t,” Howard reflects. “It’s hard. You see kids who put everything into it and could have easily won.”
Besides the host, much else has changed for the show during the past 60 years:
Spin-offs were added. After the success of the DC-area version, which includes schools from the suburbs of Northern Virginia and Maryland, other mid-Atlantic versions subsequently premiered on the CBS affiliate in Baltimore and the NBC affiliate in Charlottesville. Those three regions’ victors have been competing each year in an intercity championship to determine an ultimate winner. McGarry also hosted the Baltimore version from 1973 to 2000; Dave Zahren hosts it now.
The studio moved. In fall 2019, the DC-area version relocated from its decades-long studio at NBC-4 headquarters on Nebraska Avenue Northwest—on the other side of the wall from Meet the Press—to the World MediaNet studio in National Harbor, Maryland. That lasted all of a few months, until the pandemic hit. They’re still planning to conduct the show virtually at the beginning of the fall 2021 season, but they hope to return to an in-person format by season’s end in June 2022, if not sooner.
The sponsors changed. Since 1967, supermarket chain Giant Food had sponsored the show, but that partnership ended in April. Beginning with the current season, the sponsors will now be billionaire businessman David M. Rubenstein and the nonprofit organization MITRE. It’s personal for Rubenstein, a 72-year-old Baltimore native, who explained in a press release announcing his sponsorship: “I remember watching the show when I was growing up.”
The Past Year and a Half
When the COVID-19 pandemic hit in March 2020, the showrunners were determined to keep It’s Academic on the air, says Howard. “It was never an option for us not to,” she says. “So it quickly became, how do we make it happen?”
Conducting matches over Zoom required some rule changes. Under the prior in-person format, the final lightning round featured all three teams attempting to buzz in first to answer each question, as on Jeopardy! “But internet speeds are different. Some of our students live in more rural counties, and their connection might freeze up,” Howard explained. “So we changed everything to one team at a time, with individualized questions.”
Under COVID-era lightning-round rules, then, each team had 45 seconds to answer a separate set of 10 questions. At June’s intercity championship, that final round actually changed the ultimate outcome.
Baltimore-area champion Howard High of Ellicott City, Maryland, was leading by the slimmest of margins heading into the final round, by a single question’s point value: 380 to 370 to 330. At the last minute—literally—DC-area champion Blake High of Colesville, Maryland, took the lead during the lightning round’s final moments and never looked back, answering nine out of 10 questions correctly with several seconds to spare. Their grand prize: $1,500 in scholarship money for the team of three.
Their win couldn’t have come as a shock. Less than a decade prior, Blake High had become the first team to ever “three-peat” with consecutive intercity championship victories, in 2012, 2013, and 2014. (Montgomery Blair High of Silver Spring, Maryland, became the only other team to accomplish the feat, in 2017, 2018, and 2019.)
Last year’s Blake team of senior Olivia Gyapong and juniors Theo Sodani and Peter Willis took preparation seriously, practicing four times a week and memorizing everything from world capitals to all the members of President Biden’s nascent Cabinet. Plus, it surely didn’t hurt that assistant coach Charles Kalina had competed on the show three decades prior for Rockville High of Maryland.
Gyapong, 18, spent years watching It’s Academic with her mother on Saturday mornings. Later, her history teacher brought students to the studio’s cheering section for tapings. “Then I joined the team and just fell in love with it,” she says. “It’s Academic means absolutely everything to me. My team and coaches are like a second family.”
It may sound corny, says Gyapong, but the intense practice sessions felt like her “safe space” because of how much time the students spent together bonding. Plus, it was just a good time. “Model U.N. and debate team were really intense—you’d go to days-long conferences and tournaments—but It’s Academic was always fun,” she says. “It’s a total outlet to engage with my nerdiness.”
And it isn’t all completely trivial, in the negative sense of the word. “It’s made me a lot smarter,” says Gyapong. “I’m able to pick up on references—math, science, literature, history, geography.”
All that training came in handy when she recently took the Jeopardy! college-tournament test. One question she got right: how many keys are on a standard piano. (It’s 88.) “I don’t play piano,” says Gyapong. “So I would never have known that if not for It’s Academic.”
Every now and then, she even gets to feel like a star. “Getting to say that I’ve been on TV is really cool,” she says. “I was working part time at my grocery store over the summer, and people would ask, ‘Don’t I recognize you from TV?’ when I was ringing them up.”
The upcoming years
How will the show morph in the future—perhaps over the next 60 years?
“The show is always changing and adapting to what children are learning,” Howard says. “As literature changes in the classroom, certain books are in vogue, certain books are out of vogue. Certain facts or elements of history were once taught universally that aren’t any longer.”
Question topics have evolved over the years, agrees Altman. “History and literature are a lot more inclusive,” she says. “You have not just American authors, but you’re much more likely to get, say, African or Asian authors. They don’t tend to read Shelley and Keats and Byron as much anymore. Kids are reading more fantasy.” The Juneteenth holiday is another example of something students weren’t expected to know about a decade or so ago, but might pop up on the show today, she says.
Does that concern her—that the one-time lions of academia may have tumbled a bit from their perches? Nope. “It’s not so much eliminating content,” says Altman, “as broadening it.”
It’s Academic airs from October to June at 10 a.m. Saturdays on NBC-4. And for your teenager who considers that an impossible time to wake up, the episodes are also uploaded to the It’s Academic official YouTube channel for on-demand viewing.
Feature image courtesy It’s Academic
This story originally ran in our October issue. For more stories like this, subscribe to our monthly magazine.
