On November 28, 1956, Van Doren made his first appearance on the NBC quiz show "Twenty-One". "Twenty-One" was not Van Doren's first game show interest. He was long believed to have approached producers Dan Enright and Albert Freedman, originally, to appear on "Tic-Tac-Dough", another game they produced. Van Doren eventually revealed—five decades after his "Twenty-One" championship and fame, in a surprise 2008 article for "The New Yorker"—that he did not even own a television set, but had met Freedman through a mutual friend, with Freedman initiating the idea of Van Doren going on television by way of asking what he thought of "Tic-Tac-Dough".