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. He was long believed to have approached producers Dan Enright and Albert Freedman, originally, to appear on Tic-Tac-Dough, another game they produced.

Twenty-One was not Van Doren's first game show interest. On November 28, 1956, Van Doren made his first appearance on the NBC quiz show Twenty-One. Vivienne Nearing, Jack Barry and Van Doren on Twenty-One (March 11, 1957)