Jeopardy! has been on the air, in some form or fashion, for six a long time. The game show adopted its modern format in 1984, and little has modified since. A typical episode rattles off 61 questions in a zippy 22 minutes, with temporary intermissions for the get-to-know-ya contestant interviews, the Daily Double math, and the roiling anxiety of the ultimate wager. That’s all there’s to it. Jeopardy! has been a remarkably stable beast during a wobbly financial environment for network television, which is precisely why the show’s latest United Kingdom spinoff—which debuted earlier this month on ITV—has emerged as such an uncanny product.
The British have done the unthinkable. They have taken the best trivia show ever made—evidenced by its a long time’ price of continued syndication—and altered its DNA in small yet momentously silly ways. The show has been prolonged out to an hour, with two opening rounds of questions before moving on to the way more consequential Double Jeopardy board (much like the present, misguided prime-time U.S. celebrity editions). The prize pool has been hemmed in to ridiculously piddly amounts. The most cost-effective answers rating a dinky £25, while probably the most difficult clues—price $1,000 in America—register at £150. And then there’s the issue at the rostrum.
Our host is the affable and beloved Stephen Fry, a legitimate star, who actually cuts the silhouette of a Jeopardy! presenter along with his professorial vibe, woody voice, and resonant worldliness. But Fry seems incapable of matching the brisk, staccato cadence of the departed Alex Trebek or his disciple in Ken Jennings (to say nothing of Mayim Bialik, or, hell, even Aaron Rodgers!). On U.K. Jeopardy!, Fry is a person of digressions and asides. He rarely lets a clue go by without tacking on a few of his own wonky commentary. When Trebek was really cooking, he could marshal out three questions in 30 seconds. Fry is lucky to get through one a minute, such is his have to comment on every right and unsuitable answer. It is a brutal reminder—as if any fan of the franchise needs one at this point—that not everyone seems to be as much as being a Jeopardy! host.
To be fair, Fry has plenty of time to fill, and that necessitates a version of Jeopardy! that’s slower, sleepier, and irritatingly nonchalant—especially in comparison with the American mother ship, which treats the show like an expert sport. Nobody appears to be all that pleased with this desecration. The notoriously cranky English press, just like the Sun, has already compiled the brewing anathema local viewers are harboring toward this imported trivia tradition.(“Absolute boring tripe with a crap presenter!” reads one characteristically eloquent take.) Even funnier are the outraged Americans piling up their very own pedantic critiques, to which I obviously relate. (“The show needs to be shortened to 30 minutes, the second round of single Jeopardy needs to be scrapped, and Stephen Fry needs to be replaced,” reads one review written by a righteously change-resistant American who found the show on YouTube.)
But the reality is the British incarnation of Jeopardy! was in a no-win situation from the beginning. This is definitely the fourth time producers have attempted to kickstart the show across the pond after short-lived endeavors within the ’80s and ’90s, and unsurprisingly, none of those conversions found an audience. Jeopardy! is a North American institution, and possibly my favorite television show of all time. But additionally it is, undoubtedly, replete with all varieties of maladaptive eccentricities that were ensconced within the rulebook years ago, and have never been excised for clarity. These things can get lost in translation. Answering trivia in the shape of an issue is bizarre, so good luck explaining that premise to anyone who hasn’t been watching Jeopardy! since they were a preteen. In the episodes I watched of the U.K. facsimile, Fry needed to reiterate those procedural quirks to contestants on multiple occasions, after they buzzed in without the correct phrasing. It is perhaps instinctual to native members of Jeopardy! nation, but can you actually blame newcomers for being turned off by, I don’t know, a baffling, free-associative sentence like, “What is isosceles triangle?”
Also, more importantly, Jeopardy! is, at its core, an especially straightforward trivia game show. It became venerated due to the extraordinary competitive fandom surrounding it, what with all of the winning streaks, GOAT debates, and championship showdowns. Jeopardy! has sustained a very impressive American cult—scroll through the J! Archive when you’re not convinced—and that well-hewn infrastructure simply doesn’t exist within the United Kingdom. So if someone tuned in to the show for the primary time, probably on a rainy Wednesday in beautiful Milton Keynes or something, they’d probably think Jeopardy! is little greater than Stephen Fry posing a slew of softball queries to a trio of bemused nerds. They’d be unsuitable, in fact, nevertheless it’d be hard to argue with them.
All that is to say that British Jeopardy! is probably going doomed, identical to the persistently it was doomed before. Some television rituals are isolated in their very own circumstances. Jeopardy! won’t ever belong to the world. The Atlantic Ocean is a merciless barrier of norms. Could I get “Reckless Brand Expansion” for £75, Stephen?
Credit : slate.com
