Ralph Edwards was a prolific creator of game shows, and his signature program was Truth or Consequences, a wacky sort of prototype for shows like Nickelodeon’s Double Dare, which explains the tendency of This is Your Life to feel like a game show. There are prizes, but all the questions are rhetorical and the answers rarely heard. In a representative exchange, as Edwards describes the morning of the bombing, he reaches the moment when the Hiroshima air raid siren sounded (the show attempts to make the memory more vivid for a startled Tanimoto by playing the same sound in the studio) and asks, “Did you run for cover?” The idea is that the show’s research team has already learned everything there is to know about the subject, so when Edwards asks Tanimoto a question, there is clearly a correct answer and that answer is so strongly implied by the question’s phrasing that there is in fact no need to speak it. The answer is no, but he feels like that’s not what he’s supposed to say. Army reconnaissance planes flying overhead most of the time, so this was taken for granted, this air raid siren.” Every morning it went off, didn’t it? As I understand, there were U.S.