Kenyon Saint Claire is the son of a distinguished literary family, a keeper and teacher of the written word, but his America is a land of small screens, moving images, big pharma, high-tech distraction, and endless advertising. False impressions are the stock-in-trade, and big metrics matter, especially onscreen. That’s where Kenyon finds himself, drawn into the electronic environs of primetime television. The year is 1956. Inspired by true events, employing a groundbreaking form that evokes our agitated, media-soaked century, M. Allen Cunningham’s urgently animates America’s misunderstood quiz show scandals in light of our own time, as a moment of cultural reckoning whose reverberations we feel all around us today: in reality television, TV politics, the triumph of incoherence, and the pandemic problem of how to be real in a world of screen-induced self-deception.