Jeopardy! And What Are Things That Are Different Are Not The Same

Jeopardy! set. Photo by Khue Tran

For the two hundred-odd years our family has inhabited our beloved Up Yonder in West Virginia, some traditions have endured while others only have a season. The main get together times of Fourth of July and Christmas are pretty much set in stone, other than natural disaster, rapture, or modification for Covid-19. Others, like massive tarps and tailgating on top of the mountain gave way to the permanent facilities of the built, then expanded picnic shelter and camping facilities. Some, like repelling across the pond, only happened once, initially because of Aunt Nora’s loss of a brand-new red shoe of which we still haven’t heard the end, and then because the expanding four lane below meant it had to be drained and removed.

Then there were other traditions borne of habit. No matter what else was going on, no matter the conversation going, or meal being eaten, or who was there to enjoy it with, right around 7:15pm Aunt June was going to stand up, pull out a cigarette, and start walking and/or in later years riding her Kawasaki MULE to her house which was right beside ours. You could be mid-sentence in the greatest story ever told; nope, 7:15pm Aunt June has to go. Hottest political debate of the day reaching a crescendo? Tough wallo jellybeans, it was a Virginia Slim and a bee line the few hundred yards to her house. Long lost relative from out of town in to reconnect? They better wait a while, because there was serious business over on WSAZ Channel 3 to be seen too first.

Because Up Yonder and across the nation for millions of folks, at 7:30pm Eastern Standard Time for the better part of 30 years the world stopped for Jeopardy! At least it did for Aunt June and millions of others. The timeslot was not just treated with the reverence of church, but was a competition. Whoever was in the living room during was competing to see who got what questions correct, and would hear about it relentlessly until the next episode the following evening. You definitely did not want to “lose” on a Friday and hear about it until Monday night. Watching her beloved game show with Alex Trebek was not a spectator sport, and your own cache of self-worth was as much at risk as the contestant’s winnings.

Those memories are precious, especially some five years since Aunt June ceased to watch Jeopardy! nightly after shuffling off her mortal coil following a “What is cancer” diagnosis in 2016. I missed her funeral, as I was inpatient in the hospital myself at the time, and most evenings, when I was lucid enough to watch, Jeopardy! was a welcome respite from the monotonous routine of intensive medical care.

Long story semi-short: I’ve loved and appreciated Jeopardy! for as long as I can remember. Which is the context, and surprising to folks, background in which I did this:

Just cancel Jeopardy. Seriously, just let it go.

— Andrew Donaldson (@four4thefire) August 24, 2021

Just…hear me out.

This is more than a bit of a troll, of course. Jeopardy! isn’t going anywhere. In addition to its popularity and pop culture status, Jeopardy! is one of the most profitable properties in television history. Merv Griffin bragged in his biography that he made $70 million just from the writing credits from the “Think!” jingle now universally known as the Jeopardy! theme. A tune he wrote, interestingly enough, as a lullaby for his child.

Depending on which version you believe, what we now know as Jeopardy! made its way from Merv Griffin’s mind to legendary status via his wife. Julann Griffin’s off-handed comment on a plane ride in 1963 that there hadn’t been any “question and answer” type game shows since the quiz show scandals of the late 1950s. The idea of giving answers to get the questions had been done before in the 40s but seemed like just the change up the television game show quiz format needed. There was some starts and stops along the way, but once the magic connection of game and the recently passed Alex Trebek married in 1984, till death did they part, a juggernaut romped the TV prime time lineup.

When my eminent friend and Ordinary Times legend Burt Likko took exception to my tweet¹ and wrote his thoughts on Jeopardy! this paragraph was relatable to me:

The difficulty and seeming obscurity of the questions became a part of pop culture as well. It became a mark of prestige to be the person in a family or a group of friends who could get Jeopardy! questions right when playing along at home. Quietly, half an hour daily on most weekdays, from 1984 to his death in 2020, Alex Trebek and Jeopardy! helped make being smart cool, to make trivia quizzes a national craze, and most of all to celebrate knowing things.

Hand up. That was me. I wanted to know things. Growing up pre-to-early internet knowing things meant talking to adults, raiding my father’s books, and trying to out-Jeopardy! the ridiculously good at it June Foster Gower and other members of my family.

So, why did I tweet it was time to shut down the institution, especially knowing no such thing was going to happen?

Because, and admittedly selfishly, it isn’t Jeopardy! as we have — or at least my age group has only — known it anymore, nor never will be again.

Oh, it’s really, really close. Maybe, 80-85% of what it was. More than enough to be better than most other things, and certainly good enough to continue on for a time being.

But not the same.

Folks like Burt rightly point out that Twitter is not real life. That the ratings for the guests hosts during the yearlong replacement sweepstakes were good. That the guest hosts by and large did well. That interest in that search has kept the show at the fore of the culture dialogue. But Twitter is real, and it is both the headwaters and sloosh boxes of our media. We cannot return to unknown unknowns after knowing things. I cannot unknow how social media documented the way Ken Jennings conducts himself when not smiling to camera either during his 75-win run, various guest appearances, or his own audition for the role of Trebek replacement. I cannot unknow my lingering questions as to why Jeopardy! didn’t have more of a problem with that behavior, until the Mike Richards debacle made it suspicious that the latter, having his own similar issues with not respecting folks, wasn’t about to reel in the former. That might not be fair, but there it is, honest as I can tell you. In the latest media kerfuffle that prompted my tweet, the other announced host of Jeopardy!, Mayim Bialik, was dealing with her own social media past and statements being combed through for questionable content.

To be fair, in the current environment, I’m sure whoever Jeopardy! puts up now will get the wrong deeds carwash treatment. To Burt and probably the majority of Jeopardy fans, it doesn’t matter who the host is. Burt eloquently writes in detail why it doesn’t matter, that the whole of the show is much greater than the part of the host. That this unique universal space of great knowledge being shared by whosoever will tune in is a virtuous thing worth preserving.

In principle I agree. I want it to be true in practice as well. But I can’t. It isn’t.

That space of knowledge that was universally accessible will henceforth and forever be missing the certain something extra that made a clever spin on a quiz show into something truly special. It wasn’t the format that let the geniuses, the nerds, the trivia hounds, and the average people just wanting to poke their nose under the knowledge tent to see if they could hang all feel like they could commiserate for a bit in peace and harmony and friendly competition. It was Alex Trebek keeping the trivia circus at just the right temperature to incubate that universal feeling of comfort. His easy wit, gentle rebukes, firmness to process, and ability to be in charge without beating people over the head with it took a great show and made it special. The accessibility to knowledge that has been intimidating throughout human history had the perfect guide in Alex Trebek on Jeopardy! You could know nothing for 30 minutes and never feel stupid, just that you needed to keep at it. You could get more answers right than anyone in the room, or bar, or waiting room you were in and still feel like there was more to accomplish. For lack of a better term, Jeopardy! was as close to a high knowledge safe space as most folks will ever experience.

It just isn’t going to be the same now. Mike Richard’s bigfooting the supposed open competition and authoring his own downfall doing it is a piece of it, especially since he is still running Jeopardy! behind the scenes. Ken Jennings and his baggage, who will probably now get another shot since — as Burt points out — he had the best ratings of the guest hosts and is the logical choice for multiple reasons, is another part of it. Alex Trebek being gone is a huge part of it. The decision making to make the search for the next host into a quasi-gameshow that was really a foregone conclusion, until it wasn’t, is also a part of it. The media and social media coverage of the same is yet another part of it.

No, Twitter is not real. But increasingly, neither is the well-manicured illusion the slick production values of Jeopardy! has maintained for so long. A presentation that let folks see something that was that good and wholesome thing that was there for them in tough times having rough days of its own. We knew that to be the case logically, this is television entertainment after all, but the questions raised by the last year or so of the guest host search and related hubbub asks questions that the Jeopardy! powers that be do not seem to have answers for.

The fact remains that this next phase of Jeopardy! is not Jeopardy! as we have known it. Time is undefeated. Everything changes. Traditions come and go. Jeopardy! will go on mostly like it was. Nothing wrong with that. Lots of folks will enjoy it. Maybe the next Alex Trebek is waiting in the wings at Sony Pictures Studios’ Stage 10. Maybe in a few months, or a year, or a few years I’ll be writing another post about how wrong I was about the next version of Jeopardy! I hope so.

But that is not this day. For now, Jeopardy! has become just another point of noise in the cultural caterwauling with more than a little reality show feel to it. I hate it, but try as I might I can’t pretend it is otherwise. If they get a non-Richards, non-Jennings permanent host I’ll give them as fair a chance as I can. Honestly, I will. But for now, I’m content to let Jeopardy! go. At least the Jeopardy! and what it meant to me is gone, and if they called it a day and let the legacy speak for itself with the legendary run the show had, it would be fine with me.

But as to “What is Jeopardy!” the question is still going to be for me “Not the same as it was, despite how much I wish it was so.”

1. “I’ll write my take if you write yours” was the conversation that facilitated both pieces, just for full disclosure