In the 1950’s, an idealistic young lawyer (Morrow) working for a Congressional subcommittee discovers that a popular TV quiz show is being fixed. His investigation focuses on two contestants on the show "Twenty-One": Herbert Stempel (Turturro), a brash working-class local from Queens, and Charles Van Doren (Fiennes), the aristocratic scion of one of America's leading literary families. Based on real events, the story portrays how the network heads and advertisers who manipulated the quiz shows were also able to distance themselves from the scandal